Young and Drunk: How Poetry Shaped Nationalism in and Ireland

Author: Nina Nadirashvili

Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:108696

This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries.

Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, May 2019

Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.

YOUNG AND DRUNK:

HOW POETRY SHAPED NATIONALISM IN GEORGIA AND IRELAND

by

Ninutsa Nadirashvili

Submitted in partial fulfillment

of graduation requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts

Boston College

International Studies Program

May 2019

Advisor: Prof. Paul Christensen Advisor: Prof. Marjorie Howes

Signature: Signature:

IS Thesis Coordinator: Prof. Hiroshi Nakazato

Signature:

© Ninutsa Nadirashvili 2019

Abstract

Contemporary public perceptions of nationalism see the concept as a toxic ideology of isolationist politicians. In contrast, through an analysis of work produced by public servants whose identities are tied more closely with those of artists than politicians, this thesis shifts focus to nationalist sentiments built around inclusivity. Using poems of Ilia and Thomas Davis, this text serves as a comparative overview of nation-building strategies within Georgia and Ireland. The importance of land, myths, heroic characters, motherly figures, and calls to self-sacrifice are present in poems of both nations, uniting them in the struggle against colonial oppression and offering a common formula for creating a national identity.

To Kato.

For when she wants to know.

Acknowledgements

Multitudes of gratitude are due to Prof. Marjorie Howes and Prof. Paul Christensen. Only through your collaborative efforts could this thesis have come together. I would also like to thank Prof. Nakazato for his general guidance, Prof. Tsira Kilanava of Ilia State University for helping me fully grasp the Georgian side of things, and my loved ones for their support and encouragement.

i

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... i TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 6 2.1 MAJOR THEORIES 6 2.2 LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM 9 2.3 COLONIAL REALITIES 14 2.4 ON IRELAND AND GEORGIA 16

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH DESIGN ...... 23

CHAPTER 4: HISTORICAL CONTEXT ...... 25 4.1 GEORGIA BFORE ILIA 25 4.2 ILIA’S GEORGIA 29 4.3 THE GEORGIAN 33 4.4 IRELAND BEFRE DAVIS 35 4.5 DAVIS’S IRELAND 39 4.6 THE IRISH POET 40

CHAPTER 5: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION ...... 45 4.1 DIFFERENCES 45 4.2 SIMILARITIES 50

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION ...... 66

REFERENCES ...... 68

iii

iv Introduction

In 2015, National Geographic published an article written by Paul Salopek, a man who, while journeying on a multi-year, 21,000-mile walk across the world, had come to take a rest in a small Georgian village. Chargali, nestled into the mountains, gifted him a temporary home and an interesting story. Salopek named his journal entry “Republic of

Verse” and the subtitle read “In Georgia, – not politicians – are national heroes.”1 This is true, but perhaps it is not a naturally created reality. Across the world, colonized populations have turned to literature as a means of rebellion and educators have turned to poetry as a channel for awakening the national consciousness.2 are no exception.

Ravaged by conquest due to their country’s advantageous positioning on the border of

Europe and , Georgians have had little chance to enter politics. Instead, whether it was due to censorship or disenfranchisement, national leaders emerged through poetry, a piece of art — the power of which lies in its dual ability to express political thought in both subtle and revolutionary ways.

Inspired by my own Georgian nationality, this thesis is an account of the country’s identity-formation. In order to create a thorough but contained analysis of how Georgian nationality came to existence, the following research focuses on , Georgia's leading public figure and poet during the nineteenth century – a period of nationalist thought prevailing across . While the majority of European countries took to the task of unifying their own people, Ilia was charged with cultivating a nationalist sentiment under an

1 Paul Salopek, “Republic of Verse,” National Geographic. September 4, 2015, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/articles/2015-09-republic-of-verse/. 2 For examples of these cases, the reader can turn to “Nationalist Poetry, Conflict, and Meta linguistic Discourse” by Yasir Suleiman, “Ormo Nationalist Poetry” by Gunther Schlee, “A Soviet Patriot and Yiddish Nationalist” by Grank Gruener, “Nationalist Poets and Barbarian Poetry” by Jonathan Skinner, and many others.

1 additional strain of Russian occupation. Though it may have been a daunting challenge, a similar feat had been attempted across the continent.

Ireland, having suffered under English oppression for centuries, had given birth to

Thomas Davis, who – in turn – gave Ireland a national identity. Presently, research done on

Ireland's anti-colonial nationalism abounds in academia, with a significant portion dedicated to Davis’s work.3 In order to highlight the universal aspects of literature expressing this type of nationalist thought, the following thesis offers a comparative analysis between poems published by Ilia and Davis and the methods they employed to formulate a common identity among Georgians and the Irish, respectively.

As a land of bards, Ireland had a relationship with its poets not unlike that of

Georgia’s. Folklore accounts view poetry as a gift from God, “a gift which all the learning in the world could not give to a person, a gift which lack of learning could not deprive a person of.”4 Though it may be surprising, Ilia, himself, was well aware of a connection between the two countries. His knowledge of the Irish issue was extensive and he wrote of it on several occasions in his newspaper – “Iveria.” In 1872, he translated a Thomas Moore5 poem, publishing it along with his own nationalist poetry in several of the Georgian journals.6 In

1886, he wrote articles addressing the plights of the Irish. Ilia educated the Georgian populace about important figures in Irish politics such as Parnell and Gladstone, spoke at length about Irish harvest failures and poverty, and even extensively documented the history

3 Some of the examples include “Defining Irish Nationalist Anti-Imperialism” by Niamh Lynch, “Rethinking Irish History” by Thomas William Heyck, “Thomas Davis, “The Nation” and the Irish Language” by Jean- Christophe Penet, and “” by Guilio Giorello. 4 Dáithi Ó Hógáin, “The Visionary Voice: A Survey of Popular Attitudes to Poetry in Irish Tradition,” Irish University Review 9, no. 1 (1979): 45. 5 An Irish poet, singer, and songwriter. 6 Maia Ninidze and George Rukhadze, Ilia Chavchavade: Detailed Chronology of Life and Works - New Textual-Critical Investigations (: Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature, 2017), 71.

2 and conquest of Ireland through collections of . Understanding the link between these two colonized nations, his work also paid particular attention to “Rebellions in Ireland” and

“Ireland’s Right to Self-Governance and its Opponents.”7

Two of his articles on Ireland are widely cited by scholars of Ilia’s work when they discuss his brand of nationalism. In “Ireland and England,” his compassion and understanding of the Irish colonial predicament are displayed in the descriptions he uses for the Celts: “unfortunate,” “strangled,” and “miserable.” For Ilia, Irishmen are victims of “an evil act” and carriers of colonial “trauma.”8 And though he does not mention literary figures,

Ilia highlights the work done by Daniel O’Connell – the Irish politician who scouted

Thomas Davis and put him in charge of creating a nationalist sentiment.

In his other work – “The Anglo-Irish Relations” – Ilia produces an interesting piece of writing. He analyzes English policies concerning Ireland and writes of two major movements: those that are striving towards a political solution and those that are arguing for change through force. Ilia sees the more peaceful movements – such as that of Gladstone – slowly failing. Although he argues that “The major ideology within Gladstone’s proposals, whether it be today or tomorrow, will ultimately be victorious because at the head of these, as we have often said, sit truth and love of mankind.” He continues, “These two cornerstones of man’s peaceful existence and happiness cannot be defeated, cannot be overshadowed, and sooner or later will find a way and will hold their rightful place within every society.”9 Ilia speaks further about the growing call for violence within the Fenians10

7 Maia Ninidze and George Rukhadze, 218-236. 8 Ilia Chavchadze, “Ireland and England” [in Georgian], Iveria (Tbilisi), 1886. 9 Ilia Chavchadze, “Anglo-Irish Relations” [in Georgian], Iveria, (Tbilisi), 1886, 4. 10 A collection of organizations dedicated to Ireland’s independence in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

3 and the Irish Americans, and fears that this can lead to England justifying brute force against the Irish. Though he also highlights his understanding of how this tactic of the revolutionaries can be used to apply significant pressure to England.11 It must have been clear to Ilia’s readers – after the publication of such a large volume of articles on the Irish – that there was a connection between the colonial realities of Georgia and Ireland.

Today, Ireland continues to be an example of anti-colonial struggle, but little has been written about Georgians, their perseverance against the , and their guide in the fight – Ilia Chavchavadze. This nation of less than five million has kept her language, traditions, churches, and history; but while the rest of the world remains ignorant of her struggle for existence, Georgia has herself started to forget about the true nature of her nationalism. This is a nationalism of the colonized. It is a nationalism of Davis and Ilia, one that strives for inclusion, one that has a history of struggle as a bigger unifier than any ethnicity, religion, or race.

Therefore, this research attempts to show how an inclusive brand of anti-imperial nationalism was created by poets in Georgia and in Ireland in hopes that somewhere along the line, Georgia can also become a country we turn to for discussions on national identity- formation. To those Georgian-speakers who come across this text, take it as a call for action.

Translate, so that our literature can be read and appreciated by the rest of the world; so that the Irish, the Indians, and the South Africans can find their own faces in Ilia’s poems.

Translate, so that our own people are reminded of what we have in common with the Irish –

11 In a peculiar turn of events, around 1900, the “Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland” published an article on Georgian literature, paying particular attention to Ilia’s work.

4 that we have a nationalism birthed out of a history of struggle and that it is not in our nature to be oppressed or to oppress others.

The rest of this study is organized through five additional chapters. Chapter two will serve as an overview of academic literature already existent on the topics of nationalism, linguistic nationalism, anti-colonial nationalism and nationalism within the countries of

Ireland and Georgia. The third chapter will provide a short description of the research methods used in this text. A historical context chapter will follow along, attempting to give a summary of events which impacted the poets. This chapter will lead to a comparative analysis of the poetry selected from Ilia and Davis’s works, and the thesis will culminate with a conclusion and several recommendations for further research surrounding this topic of nationalist verse.

5 Literature Review

The scientific study of nationalism – a term defined at times as a manufactured linguistic identity, in other instances as a particular ideology of solidarity based on preindustrial roots or a distinctly industrial principle of social evolution and social organization – largely relies on the initial works of Ernest Gellner, Karl Wolfgang Deutsch,

Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith.1 Since the understanding of these theorists and their writing is necessary for any discussion on nationalism regardless of the nation chosen for a case study, the following section will serve as a literature review of their work. This literature review will be loosely organized as follows: major theories and sub-theories, work done around linguistic nationalism, anti-colonial nationalism, and a synopsis of work written on Irish and . In surveying the literature in such a way, I aim to carve out space within current research that this particular thesis attempts to fill.

Major Theories

In his widely cited “The Ethnic Origin of Nations” Anthony Smith uses French revolutionary Abbé Sieyès’s declaration that nations are part of a divine plan and “exist in the state of nature”2 in order to describe the early views of nationalism that were strongly influenced by their organic varieties. “Nations were seen as the natural and primordial divisions of humanity, and nationalism was thought to be ubiquitous and universal.”3 Smith

1 Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Smith’s Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, and Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 12-13. 3 Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.

6 recounts this older perspective of scholars, which argues that differences in customs, language, and religion could be used as proof that nations existed in all human societies, even when they remained largely dormant.4

Today, the major school of thought on nationalism has moved towards Modernism and sees nations stemming from social, economic and political conditions of the current world.5 The first and most influential work done around modernist theory is attributed to

Ernest Gellner’s 1964 publication – “Thought and Change”6– in which he deems industrialization as the main nationalizing force. While Gellner analyzes the split among territories and into separate nations, Karl Deutsch prioritizes communication networks and is more concerned with nation-building.7 He argues that Gellner’s concept of modernity actually increases the channels of communication, leads to linguistic homogeneity and links outer regions to cities, ultimately creating societal unity.8

Bringing variety to the discussion, Eric Hobsbawm9 opposes Gellner’s idea of nationalism being a product of the pushback against imperial forces and instead, emphasizes it as a concept created by elites in an attempt to mobilize and subjugate the masses. This view – referred to as Constructionist – holds that “nationalism comes before nations; nations do not make states, but the other way around.”10 Other followers of this theory, such

4 Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 3. 5 Philip Gorski, “The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism” American Journal of Sociology 105 no. 5 (2000), 14-28; and Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism : a Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nationalism (London: Routledge. 1998). 6 Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism,” in Thought and Change, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964). 7 Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication : An Inquiry into the Foundation of Nationality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966), 97. 8 Ibid. 9 E. J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” in The Invention of Tradition, edited by E. J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-15. 10 E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press. 1992), 10.

7 as Motyl and Anderson often soften it by de-emphasizing the ‘project’ metaphor and highlighting the psychological factors involved in creating a nation. To exemplify this,

Anderson11 proposes the idea that nations employ maps, museums, flags, and anthems, along with print capitalism in order to imagine themselves.

Opposing the Modernists, scholars such as Philip Gorski,12 Liah Greenfield,13 Susan

Reynolds,14 John Armstrong,15 and Adrian Hastings16 push the roots of nationalism further back in time. Gorski attributes the birth of nationalism to the Protestant revolution against

Spanish rule and its focus on the story of Israel. Greenfield ties the concept to 16th century

England and the time of Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Reynolds and Armstrong emphasize the communities created by Medieval Kingdoms and held together by churches, while Hastings argues the importance of pre-modern Bible translations.

The synthesis of both Modernist theory and its opposition has created

Ethnosymbolism, giving way to the idea that political and ideological notions of nationalism came along with modernity but the materials necessary for its creation – such as religion and ethnicity – existed long before. This school of thought also prioritizes the cultural aspects of nationalism over political or economic factors. For instance, Hutchinson speculates that the

11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed., (London: Verso, 1991). 12 Philip Gorski, “The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism.” 13 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism : Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992). 14 Susan Reynolds, “The Idea of the Nation as Political Community,” in Power and the Nation in European History, eds. L. Scales and O. Zimmer (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 15 John A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, (Chapel-Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1982). 16 Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood : Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

8 symbols which unite populations and are drawn from pre-modern culture have the heaviest hand in creating a national identity and legitimizing political authority.17

Language and Nationalism

Language remains in most nationalist research one of the major pre-requisites for a communal feeling. Since a portion of the following thesis deals with this aspect of nationalism,18 I now turn to Gellner’s seminal theory on language. Across the academic spectrum, there are theorists who view language as either critical in causing nationalism or as a major product of it. For Gellner, language functions as a key component in industrialization. Since industrial economies necessitate the creation and teaching of a standard written language, non-dominant language groups suffer and react with their own language-based nationalist movements.19 Because the industrial society is in constant flux, the only way for workers to move rapidly from one industry to another is by being literate in the same standardized language. Literacy leads to not only economic but eventually political and social participation. It is “[t]he minimal requirement for full citizenship, for effective moral membership of a modern community… .”20

The adoption and standardization of an official language goes through a process of picking one dialect, usually the one spoken by a politically dominant group. This marginalizes those who speak languages distant from the standard dialect. Ripped from their traditional way of life, first by industrialization and second by the promulgation of a foreign

17 John Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict, (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2005), 79-84. 18 Though most of Davis’s work was done in English, language was given a note-worthy role in his nationalism. This will be further discussed in the analysis chapter. 19 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 43-44. 20 Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism,” in Thought and Change, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964).

9 standard language, these disadvantaged groups sometimes possess a sufficiently developed intelligentsia and can form their own nationalist movements around specific dialects.

“Nationalism itself is fated to prevail, but not any one particular nationalism.”21 Language- based national movements are not a byproduct of people’s inherent connection with their mother tongue, but more of a result of social organization necessitated by industrialization.

Gellner’s model of language being a divisive force between nations will be further exemplified in discussions of Georgian and Irish nationalism in later chapters.

Gellner’s model has led to three main variants. They rely on the ways in which language becomes a defining factor, the conditions necessary for nationalism, and the level of intentionality in creating a language-based movement. For example, Deutsch22 focuses on the unifying nature of language and its ability to collect cultural concepts. A community

“consists of people who have learned to communicate with each other and to understand each other well beyond the mere interchange of goods and services.”23 The basis of national community and a sense of a common past is built by “complementary habits and facilities of communication.”24

Deutsch finds evidence of linguistic assimilation in the Middle Ages but notes that the adoption of an official language becomes a larger trend in the 1800s,25 a time period notable for the push towards modern state-building and the consolidation of capitalism in

Europe. Deutsch uses Finland as an illustration of a dominant urban Swedish community

21 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 45. 22 Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication : An Inquiry into the Foundation of Nationality. 23 Ibid., 17. 24 Ibid. 25 Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, “The Trend of European Nationalism—the Language Aspect,” American Political Science Review 36 no. 3 (1942): 532.

10 losing power to the Finish speaking masses.26 Even today, language remains a fundamental characteristic of most nationalist groups and allows for the creation and transmission of collective memories.27

It was in the 1790s that J.G. Herder, a German philosopher, introduced his theory on the national language as one of the essential characteristics of every nation. In “Yet

Another Philosophy of History,” Herder criticizes universalism and argues that every culture is an end in and of itself. For him, nations possess a Volksgeist (a soul)28 of their own that makes them unique and it is the national language that enables the distinctive expression of every nation’s individual soul. Where there is a lack of language difference between groups, other aspects have to be emphasized in order to create distance.

Hobsbawm, who stresses the intentional nature with which nationalism is created by the elites, also highlights linguistic identity as an elite project used for gaining political power and creating a hegemony over populations. To Hobsbawm, “Nations are constructed essentially from above.”29 When creating these projects, nationalist leaders are confronted with the challenge of forming a language capable of relaying necessary concepts.30 This process of constructing a vocabulary of needed terms to govern society is taken on by the state and therefore, “languages multiply with states: not the other way around.”31 Hobsbawm

26 Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication : An Inquiry into the Foundation of Nationality, 130- 132. 27 Ibid., 172-173. 28 Jean-Louis Bandet, The German Literature of Paris (Paris: French University Press, 1987), 35. 29 E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 10. 30 Ibid., 52-53. 31 Ibid., 63.

11 argues that the symbolic nature of language is a product of nationalism and uses the devotion of state resources by politicians to modernizing the language as evidence.32

While Deutsch, Gellner, and Hobsbawm rely on the political and economic structures of society in creating linguistic nationalism, Anderson views nationalism as a result of a particular group’s desire to see themselves as a single community. This imagined community guarantees that even individual members who only interact with a small portion of the nation can believe in sharing an essential characteristic with the rest of the community. Anderson sees language playing a key role in such imagination, but attributes its power to the rise of print media which provides an appearance of a standard language and perpetuates the idea that language can define a nation.

Two main criticisms emerge against the modernist views of language – those of

Hastings and Smith. Hastings believes that “oral languages are proper to ethnic groups: widely written vernaculars to nations.”33 To him, the basis of proto-national identities is largely formed through the Protestant endeavor of translating the Bible into vernacular and making it widely accessible.34 In doing so, protestants allowed the promotion of national language by extending the vernacular lexicon, increasing the audience of such a language by virtue of the Bible’s popularity with the masses, and using the narratives within the holy text as models of nationhood.35 Here, Hastings not only dates the presence of linguistic nationalism earlier than other scholars but also links language with religion.

32 E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 31. 33 Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood : Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, 21. 34 Ibid., 20. 35 Ibid., 32.

12 Hastings further argues that states whose nationalism has historically been tied with religion are often ones most difficult to colonize. He describes the ’s inability to digest Catholic Poland, Great Britain’s failure to subdue Ireland and the non-conforming behavior of Orthodox nationalist Serbs. In each case, he writes, “we see the defiant power of a nationalism grounded in religious identity.”36 Modern examples of Buddhist nationalists in

Burma have shown that no religion is excluded from being able to tie itself to the nation.

Still, Hastings specifies that while religion can contribute powerfully to nation-construction, within Churches, mosques and synagogues exists a strong universalist and anti-nationalist dimension as well.

For Anthony Smith, language becomes simply one of the many elements which can unify and distinguish people. He de-emphasizes its importance by terming it “one of the most malleable and dependent cultural categories; apart from the great language fissures, particular linguistic formations are largely the product of the interplay of religion and political organization in a given area.”37 This implies that language operates only in conjunction with other aspects of cultural revival by rediscovering national epics, folk songs, etc. Smith argues that while poets and other artists play a key role in nationalist movements, fewer resources are devoted to language itself and more is given to the creation and circulation of a narrative which links the modern nation to a “golden age.”

Most of these scholars agree that there is a dose of engineering involved in formalizing a language. Sociolinguists emerge as the new group of scientists interested in how nationalists maintain language differences and guarantee that idioms reflect national

36 Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood : Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, 185. 37 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, 27-28.

13 identity. For example, linguist Ernest Haugen coins the term ‘language planning’ in order to describe “the activity of preparing a normative orthography, grammar, and dictionary for the guidance of writers and speakers in a non-homogeneous speech community.”38 Meanwhile,

Louis-Jean Calvet argues that the state’s willingness to manipulate language is “as old as the myth of the Tower of Babel itself.”39

Colonial Realities

If nationalisms can be divided between those that use a common language as their basis and those that do not, another distinctive factor appears to be the split between colonizers and the colonized. Influenced by the approach of Karl Deutsch, Miroslav Hroch pioneers the comparative social history of nation forming in nineteenth-century Europe. In his books, Hroch seeks to ground the study of national consciousness in a systematic comparison of different patriotic activities (whether they be rebellions, revolutionary publications or formations of anti-colonial groups) of nations that he characterizes as small nationalities or non-dominant ethnic groups.40

Hroch’s work focuses on communities which live on a small territory but are dominated by an outsider ruling class. Though his research hones in on Eastern European countries, Hroch points out that this minority nationalism is also present in Ireland.41 He terms these ‘national movements’ and distinguishes them from the ‘state nationalism’ of

Western Europe.

38 Einar Ingvald Haugen, “Language Planning in Modern Norway,” in The Ecology of Language: Essays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972), 133. 39 Louis Jean Calvet, Language Wars and Linguistic Politics (Oxford University Press, 1998), 113. 40 Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National : A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 59. 41 Ibid., 62.

14 Hroch's research highlights three structural phases of national movements. The initial period energizes activists, most of whom do not believe in their community’s ability to form a nation but are devoted to the linguistic, cultural, and social revival of the non- dominant group. The second phase allows for the emergence of nationalists who work to win over the masses in order to start the project of nation-building, and it is in the third phase that a full social structure can come into being.42 All three of these phases are present in the nationalist movements of Georgia and Ireland and the first two will be extensively discussed in the historical context chapter.

Along similar lines, Anderson asserts that a major component in understanding the origins of movement nationalisms and anti-colonial nationalisms is grasping the concept of

‘bilingual intelligentsia.’ These groups have access to “modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and in particular, to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century.”43 Both Ilia and Davis, whose work is analyzed here, spoke the language of their colonial masters and had been educated or had traveled abroad.

Yet, other critics have suggested that in attempting to understand anti-colonial nationalism, we must highlight how the 'colonial difference' between the oppressors and the oppressed were maintained. In their works, Ania Loomba and Partha Chatterjee draw a distinction between nationalism as a political movement and a cultural construct. Chatterjee writes that “if the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into

42 Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National : A Reader, 63. 43 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: lights on the origins and spread of nationalism, 113.

15 being.”44 Thus, anti-colonial nationalism often takes charge over issues such as language, religion, art, and popular culture. Abiola Irele argues, for example, that in several African nations “the literary effort became identified with an ideological project, which often turned out to be coextensive with aggressive militancy.”45

Other researches have been dedicated to interpreting anti-colonial nationalism of specific cases. Vezzadini’s study of Sudan and Adria Lawrence’s account of the anti-colonial protests in the French Empire serve as examples of how nationalist discourses became dominant due to the failure of a reformist agenda, which had pushed for a peaceful discussion with the colonial powers.46

On Ireland and Georgia

Clare Carroll and Patricia King, in their edited collection on “Ireland and

Postcolonial Theory,” argue that the strength of viewing Ireland as a colony is its ability to be “critical of both a blithe narrative of modernization and an unreflective narrative of nationalist traditionalism.”47 According to Carroll, scholars over-analyze the impact of

European industrialization and labor and mistakenly put more importance on economic struggle and political isolation when discussing the causes of Ireland’s nationalism. Instead, she argues that with the employment of a postcolonial theoretical lens, the base of nationalism becomes the anti-colonial struggle itself.

44 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 45 Abiola Irele, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2001), 53. 46 Adria Lawrence, “Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism : Anti-colonial Protest in the French Empire” Problems of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Elena Vezzadini, “Lost Nationalism : Revolution, Memory and Anti-colonial Resistance in Sudan” Eastern African Studies (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2015). 47 Clare Carroll and Patricia King, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (: Cork University Press, 2003), 2.

16 Historians have also paid some attention to the anti-imperial nature of Irish nationalism by examining the way in which the Irish wrote about British imperialism in

India.48 Other studies have also focused on individual nationalists who integrated anti- imperialism into their agendas – using Michael Davitt as a prime example. What these scholars have confirmed is that Irish nationalists have been both aware and critical of the rest of the Empire.

In “After History: Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies,” David Lloyd criticizes a historical viewpoint of Ireland that disregards Ireland’s colonial reality and argues that majority of studies have minimized the sizable impact of colonization on Ireland’s struggle for independence. He also holds that the historical lens disregards the cultural factors that formed Irish identity under British rule. By focusing on language and arts, Lloyd provides a better view of the Irish experience.49 Building on Lloyd, Luke Gibbons claims that Ireland’s history is shaped largely by literary and artistic movements against the British.

D. George Boyce in “Nationalism in Ireland”50 and Robert Kee in “The Green

Flag”51 also provide excellent discussions of the many strands of Irish nationalism and the growth of local self-consciousness in the first English colony and its implications for nationalism. Kee’s history includes frequent references to Irish literature and Boyce’s work examines the relationship between ideas and political and social reality. Both books attempt

48 S.B. Cook’s “Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges Between India and Ireland,” T.G. Fraser’s “Ireland and India,” Michael Silvestri’s “The Sinn Fein of India: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal,” and Howard Brasted’s “Irish Models and the Indian National Congress, 1870-1922”. 49 David Lloyd, “Ireland after History” Critical Conditions 9 (Cork: Cork University Press in Association with Field Day, 1999). 50 David George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London : Croom Helm, 1982). 51 Robert Kee, Emmet J. Larkin, and Dianne Larkin, The Green Flag : A History of Irish Nationalism (London: Penguin Books, 2000).

17 to explain why the drive of Irish nationalism has largely failed to unify Ireland and save the entire territory from English oppression. This calls the benefits of revolutionary nationalism into question and scholars such as Clifford Geertz have argued that as the excitement of the political revolt recedes, the nation is left with “problems of meaning.” The questions of

“why go on?” emerge along with poverty, tribal violence, and political corruption.52

Seamus Deane takes the discussion on language and Ireland even further and points out how the use of English within the nation hinders progress. He highlights the political power of English and how it can colonize independent voices and restrict sovereignty.53 In

“Strange Country,” Deane tracks the development of Irish identity from colonial times through independence.54 He makes further claims that the Irish nationality – based around the old Irish legends which were largely exaggerated – keeps today’s Irishmen from facing reality and seeing the true identities of their present selves. While he believes that Irish legends in literary text bring about an imagined community, Dean also worries that Ireland becomes intolerant of the non-dominant Irish ways of being.

He continues to examine the creation of national identity through literature by introducing Edward Said’s text in “Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature.”55 The purpose of Said’s essay is to spark new conversations about the nature of William Butler Yeats’s poetry. Said argues that, though often overlooked because of his opposition to violent rebellion, there is still real nationalist and anti-colonial sentiment within Yeats’s writing.

52 Clifford Geertz, “After the revolution: the fate of nationalism in the new states,” in Stability and social change: a volume in honor of Talcott Parsons (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1971), 357-376. 53 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals : Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1980 (London: Faber, 1987), 118. 54 Seamus Deane, Strange Country : Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997). 55 Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Edward W. Said, and Field Day Theatre Company, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

18 In “Ireland,” James Byrne traces differences between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt in 1863, letting national literature become more than an expression of national character.

Irish language and text, according to various nineteenth-century critics, becomes evidence of nation’s merit. As early as 1887, Irish poet Lady Jane Wilde claimed that “The written word, or literature,” was “the fullest and highest expression of the intellect and culture, and scientific progress of a nation.”56

The role of literature in defining Irish cultural identity is also a major theme in

Thomas Flanagan’s “The Irish Novelists,”57 Malcolm Brown’s “The Politics of Irish literature from Thomas Davis to W.B. Yeats”58 and Herbert Howarth’s “The Irish Writers:

Literature and Nationalism.”59 These studies on the impact of politics on Irish literature illustrate the inter-relationship among the political, literary, and religious forces in Ireland.

These scholars also highlight how nationalism was impacted by both the writers who insisted on a strict Irish nationalism and those who articulated the merits of expressing Irish themes in English, a language of international significance.

Unfortunately, while academic work on Irish nationalism is extensive, there is a very small amount of research conducted about the Georgian identity and it mainly bases itself on the above-mentioned theories of nationalism founded by Smith and Anderson. Still, several scholars have used historical and philological sources to write about the beginnings of

56 Lady Jane Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (London: Ward and Downey, 1887), v. 57 Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 58 Malcolm Brown, Emmet J. Larkin and Dianne Larkin, The Politics of Irish Literature : From Thomas Davis to W.B. Yeats (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973). 59 Herbert Howarth and Brian Leeming, The Irish Writers, 1880-1940 : Literature under Parnell's Star (London: Rockliff, 1958).

19 Georgian national identity in the medieval age.60 For research on Georgian identity in post- medieval, modern and postmodern epochs, one can turn to “Georgia at the Crossroads of

Millennia,”61 in which the Georgian national identity, patriotism, national symbols, historical experience, mentality, culture, and politics are discussed by contemporary Georgian and foreign authors in conflicting and contradictory opinions, essays, letters, and other recorded texts. Among them is the letter of Zurab Kiknadze – “Ilia’s Fatherland,” in which the researcher interprets the concept of ‘land’ throughout history, beginning from the Classical age and culminating in 19th-century writings of Ilia Chavchavadze.62

In 2007, the Institute of Georgian Literature published a jubilee collection dedicated to Ilia, which contains the various essays on his personality, role in politics, reforms, and vision of nationalism. In particular, the collection notes that “Ilia created a new paradigm of

Georgian nationalism beginning in the 1860s, by first, secularizing the writings of the priestly class and then, making the concept of the land sacred.”63 This task, which Ilia Chavchavadze was charged with, “required not only the edition of the Georgian cultural memory but also a necessary recreation of it.”64 His aspiration to shape the traditional markers of Georgian identity “exposes itself in his attempt to equate nation and religion. [...] The nation to Ilia was a deity, demanded martyrdom and sacrifice while guaranteeing immortality”65

60 Lela Pataridze’s “Political and Cultural identities in the Georgian Community”, Mariam Chxaratishvili’s “Self- Identification as a Georgian Marker”, and Nino Doborjginidze’s “Language, Identity and Historical Conceptions: Interpretation of Religious Historical Sources” [all in Georgian.] 61 Zurab Kiknadze, Ilia’s Fatherland,” in Georgia at the Crossroads of Millennia [in Georgian] (Tbilisi: 2005), 28-52. 62 Ibid. 63 Zaal Andronikashvili, “Birth of the Fatherland by the Literary Soul: Formation of Language as a Project of Secularization,” in Ili Chavchavadze 170: Anniversary Collection [in Georgian] edited by I. Ratiani (Tbilisi: 2007), 171-173. 64 Giorgi Maisuradze, “Fatherland and Georgia’s Mother: Secular Symbolism in Ilia Chavchavadze’s Poetry,” in Ilia Chavchavadze 170: Anniversary Collection [in Georgian] edited by I. Ratiani (Tbilisi: 2007), 174-188. 65 Mariam Chkhartishvili, “Universality in the Nationalist Ideology of Ilia Chavchavadze’s Art and Public Service,” in Ilia Chavchavadze 170: Anniversary Collection [in Georgian] edited by I. Ratiani (Tbilisi: 2007), 215-243.

20 In 2010, with the financial support of the Rustaveli Science Foundation, the project

“Printed Media and Georgian National Identity Creation Process: Ilia’s ‘Iveria’” was published, which analyzes an extensive amount of textual material (mainly publicist discourse) in order to deduce how Ilia and his companions were able to create “the imaginary unity of Georgians” and to bring the idea of nationalism within societal consciousness through the press, print media, and the education system. Furthermore, the publication highlights that due to the dissonance between concepts of nation and state during Georgia, Ilia and his peers’ struggle for liberatory nationalism was in the field of culture, and in politics only revealed itself as a distant possibility.66

Other important projects to mention were implemented by Ilia State University.

First, “Colonial / Postcolonial Georgian Literature: Cultural Paradigm Shift” (headed by B.

Cepuria)67 and second, the Linguistic Research Center's study on Georgian and Russian linguistic and religious models of the 19th century (head N. Doborjginidze). These projects systemize new information about the pre-colonial and colonial eras in Georgian literature and how they shaped national discourse. These studies aim to educate those interested in

Georgian identity during post-medieval periods, Geo-Russian relations, cultural and collective memory, and formation of stereotypes.68

The papers present artistic texts and markers through charts that illuminate the major role of literature - as a medium of collective memory - in creating the Georgian national identity of the colonial era which spanned from the early 19th century to the fall of

66 Tinatin Bolqvadze, Formulation of Georgian National Identity: Ilia’s ‘Iveria’ [in Georgian] (Tbilisi: Universali, 2010). 67 Bela Cipuria, “Georgian Literature: Colonization, Modernization, New Paradigm” [in Georgian] kadmosi: humanitarul kvlevata junali 2 (2010): 183-195. 68 Nino Doborjginidze, Language, Identity and Historical Conceptions: Interpretation of Religious Historical Sources [in Georgian] (Tbilisi: Nekeri, 2010).

21 the Soviet Union. Among the means of literary representation of the political and socio- cultural reality, the use of markers (representations of self and the other that formed

Georgian and Russian artistic faces/roles) dominate studies. Accordingly, the research this thesis relies on most heavily is the dissertation of Tsira Kilanava.69 Kilanava maneuvers through Georgian literature, starting from “Davitiani” and culminating in the works of

Terek-drinkers – the literary movement of Ilia Chavchavadze – and uses literary markers as her major form of analysis. By doing this, she skillfully provides a thorough study of

Georgian national identity and nationalist discourse.

The Irish experience has been a benchmark in discussions centered around nationalist literature, ideology, and colonial reality but Georgia has rarely entered the conversation on an international scale. Georgian scholars have written about the subject but have not expanded the horizon in order to compare the country’s history with that of other similarly colonized nations. Ultimately, by placing it in comparison with Irish nationalism, this thesis aims to bring more attention to the Georgian national movement, its literature and the way Georgian identity has been shaped. Though it may flow along similar lines to many other countries, Georgian nationalism holds deeply personal characteristics of its own that are worth examining.

69 Tsira Kilanava, Formulation of Georgian Nationalist Discourse: Markers for Georgia and The Russian Empire, and Georgian Self-Identification in the Georgian Literature of 18th and 19th Century [in Georgian] (Tbilisi: Ilia State University, 2013).

22 Research Design

It is the hypothesis of this work that due to a poem’s ability to be indirect enough to evade censorship and epic enough to make a statement, poetry produced under colonial occupation can be used by censored writers as a means of formulating nationalist discourse.

This formulation of a nationalist discourse is done through the making and repetition of stereotypes (markers) that imprint on the colonized and the colonizer. Therefore, any analysis of such poetry can serve as a tool for observing how nations are constructed. Using

Ireland and Thomas Davis’s writing as a standard of how anti-colonial nationalism is expressed through literature – which has been done by scholars of Algerian, Palestinian,

Indian, and other nationalisms1 – this text performs a comparative and qualitative analysis by placing Davis alongside his Georgian counterpart – Ilia Chavchavadze.

Working within the theories of linguistic nationalism and anti-colonialism described in the literature review, this thesis uses case studies as the methodological approach, allowing for heavily contextualized and nuanced qualitative analysis. George and Bennett define case- study research as “the detailed examination of an aspect of a historical episode to develop or test explanations that may be generalizable to other events.”2 Accordingly, there are four main advantages to a case study method: exploring causal mechanisms, deriving new hypotheses, conceptual validity, and modeling and assessing complex causal relations.3

Keeping these in mind, Ireland and Georgia stand as the two cases for this study which takes

1 For examples of how Ireland is employed in comparative case studies of nationalist poetry, please see Majumdar’s “Yeats and Tagore”, Hussain's "Postcolonial Dimension", Thapar-Björkert and Ryan's "Mother India/Mother Ireland", Wright’s “Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis”, O’Malley’s “Northern Ireland and South Africa”, Smooha’s “The Tenability of partition”, and others. 2 Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, “Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences,” in BCSIA Studies in International Security (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 3 Hiva Feizi, "Discourse, Affinity and Attraction: A Case Study of 's Soft Power Strategy in Afghanistan" Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2018) https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7150.

23 on an explanatory research paradigm, attempting to show the cyclical relationship between poetry and nationalism.

The text will survey poems written between 1842 and 1910. This timeline begins with the first publication of “The Nation,” where Davis took up poetry and culminates in a natural finish-line due to Ilia’s murder in 1907. This fifty-eight-year period gives ample time to analyze stereotypes, major themes, and historical rediscoveries, as well as the all- encompassing drive towards self-sacrifice and liberation exhibited by both the Irish and

Georgian activists during the occupation.

First, the societal context within which Ilia and Davis were situated will be examined, helped by a brief overview of history preceding their epochs. There will then be an inspection of the general similarities and differences presented within the two poets’ works, followed by separate sections examining major themes and markers. Poetry will be picked accordingly to exemplify how similar stereotypes were being used in Ireland and in Georgia.

Poems and any other sections of the analysis quoted from outside sources have been collected through online databases, public libraries, and national archives. Portions of Ilia’s writings will be translated by me and a few translations will be provided by other scholars of his poetry. This project should show that poetry – in this case, the works of Ilia and Davis – is a site of creation for myths, stereotypes and ultimately, nations.

24 Historical Context

This section of the thesis creates a historical context for the poetry being analyzed and aims to: 1. review literature preceding the chosen poet’s work in order to give readers a general knowledge about the political environment inherited by him; 2. discuss work and aspirations of the literary movement to which the poet belonged; and 3. serve as a brief overview of the political affiliations and general biography of the poet.

Georgia Before Ilia

Though Georgian literature has been depicting Georgian-Russian relations for centuries, this thesis mainly requires an examination of their interactions following the annexation of Georgian territory by the Russian Empire. July 24th of 1783 saw the signing of the Treaty of Georgievsk, bringing the Kingdom of Kartl- (a major part of

Georgia) into the protectorate of the Russian Empire. In the same century, Eastern Georgia became briefly re-occupied by Agha Mohammad Khan and the Iranians. This split between the Northern and Southern neighbors led to internal strife and eventually civil war, ushering

Russians into the capital and letting them begin the process of annexation in 1801. This collection of events produced literature concerned with national identity and Georgia’s self- portrait. “Davitiani” – written by Davit Guramishvili – was the first work in Georgian literature to meld historical accounts of his country with biographical stories, creating a systematic model for later artwork which can serve as an introduction to the relationship between Georgia and Russia in the century before Ilia.

Guramishvili’s epic is divided into several sections. The first politically oriented portion of the text (stanzas 143 - 323) analyzes the most traumatically significant event in

25 Georgian history - one that remains an important component of literature throughout later decades - King Vakhtang’s overestimated hope in Russian solidarity, Russia’s betrayal and the subsequent annexation of Georgian territory by the Russian Empire. Stanzas 478 - 599 comprise the second political section of the epic and tell of Russia’s tactical unwillingness to come to Georgia’s aid during territorial struggles between King Vakhtang and Muslim forces from the East - ultimately culminating in Vakhtang’s death.1

In the sections of his epic where Guramishvili recounts Georgian history, he tells of

‘Georgia’s plague’ or the events that led to the country’s centuries-long colonization.

Existing on the border of Asia and Europe, Georgia remains no stranger to outside intervention and has battled for its territory since there was a territory to battle for. The eighteenth century paints a portrait of King Vakhtang who is being controlled and made uneasy by both Turkish and then Persian aggressors. The populace is living under threat from a power whose culture - having a completely different language, religion and customs - slowly chips away at the cultural and societal strength of Georgians.2

Here, “Davitiani” attempts, for the first time in Georgian literary history, to form a portrait of the country which places it in direct opposition to the Muslim invader.

Guramishvili expresses an attitude towards the Russian empire widely concurred with by his fellow countrymen. He creates a dichotomy of Russian cultural-political environment and the unfamiliar nature of the Muslim culture existing on the Eastern side of the Georgian border.3 Russia, as a fellow Orthodox Christian country, is discussed as a more natural ally.

1 Davit Guramishvili, “Davitiani” in Textbook for Secondary Schools and Universities [in Georgian], introduction by Nodar Natadze (Tbilisi: Carpe Diem, 2013), 9-24. 2 Ibid. 3 Tsira Kilanava, 25.

26 For the author and for many other citizens, Russians imposing themselves onto Georgian territory was seen as the only way of Georgian culture surviving. In passages where the author escapes warring tribes of Daghestan4 and realizes that he is in Russian territory,

Guramishvili writes,

One told another: “Pass the ‘khlebao’ lazari? / As I heard ‘khlebao’ a stroke of happiness fell onto me;/ Knees began shaking, my body started to riot, / Its columns could no longer hold and down fell the temple. / ‘khleba’ is bread in Russian, I had heard so before [...] / This happiness unwound my anxious knots!5

Still, in other instances, the danger of such a close relationship with the northern neighbor is also underlined. He writes of the historically accurate disagreements between

King Erekle, who inherited Vakhtang’s shaken throne and his court. Not forty years after the

Russian betrayal, Erekle debated on whether to ask the North for help once again or to face

Muslim invaders alone: “Those that saw the King’s actions did not rejoice, / they said what if we be even more destroyed, but some had no reaction [...] / they said: [...] / before the

Russians come to aid us, our future will be long determined.”6

What follows in Georgian history is easily predicted through the court’s forewarnings. Georgian folk songs tell the tale: “We’ve been given a Russian sovereign, /

Our Erekle has died.”7 The nineteenth century becomes a story of how Russians took power from Georgia’s rightful monarchs. The annexation of the Qartl-Kakheti region turns public opinion and rebellions against the North manifest themselves into a radical and violent form.

No important figure emerges on the social-cultural front during this period of violence and art serves the sole purpose of describing the tragedy and trauma of being colonized. Prime

4 Although today Daghestan is considered a Russian federal subject, during the writing of Davitiani and even in current times, the population of this territory was majority muslim. 5 Tsira Kilanava, 25. 6 Ibid., 26. 7 Ibid., 38.

27 examples of this kind of poetry come from Georgian royal women. “That, which was impossible to achieve for a large number of , Erekle’s women managed in their poetry. In times of powerlessness, these verses fulfilled the role of swords that had been confiscated from the royal family.”8 With a Turkish-Persian voice running throughout the entirety of their work, Erekle’s women started writing poetry resembling that of Eastern literature and completely subverted the idea of Russia being better of the two evils. It was in these poems that the artistic descriptions and symbols started forming and being assigned to the Russian Empire. “We were covered like rays of sunshine by clouds / By the irritating wind of the north / That which blows sleepily and restlessly.”9

After the women came the Romantics. , , and inherited the tone of lament from Georgia’s Royal women, elevated the tendency of praising their country’s past to grander proportions and took on the task of reflection. This meant that Romantics not only recounted contemporary history but also criticized it.10 Furthermore, Romantics systematically used the terms captive and orphan as descriptors for Georgia, effectively summarizing the state of an entire people.11 In “Hyacinth and The Wanderer,” Baratashvili describes a man who has saved a flower from death but has put it into a golden, dark and solitary cage. Being away from the homeland breaks the flower and this exchange of life for eternal imprisonment turns its protector into a master.12

In Orbeliani's “Dear Iberia!”, the author directly refers to the Georgian condition as slavery. He juxtaposes the modern politic-cultural environment with the country's history

8 Levan Asatiani, Women Poets of Old Georgia: Research and Texts [in Georgian] edited by G. Tavzishvili (Tbilisi: ssrk metsnierebata akademia saq. fileali, 1936), 24. 9 Tsira Kilanava, 41. 10 Ibid., 45. 11 Ibid., 60. 12 Ibid., 59.

28 and attributes Georgia’s national tragedy to the nation’s forgetting of its golden age. “We are starting to look like the sheep when their Shepard has not yet scolded them.”13 It is also in

Orbeliani’s work that the need for national heroes – existent in all anti-colonial literature – comes to present itself. “Who will be the hero, / whose power / could awake the voice of destiny?”14 Romantics found their national heroes by mythologizing Georgian history. In poems such as “The Toast” historical figures became a systematic formulation of national identity for the first time.15 And still, their patriotism aside, these poets – not unlike the members of Parnell's Irish Parliamentary Party and to some extent, W.B Yeats – were proponents of the Home Rule policy,16 which meant that they believed in the existence of a

Georgian people under Russian rule. For them, the Empire had to become a gateway to

Europe as a state of mind. And so, a new generation had to ascend in order to shatter this mindset.

Ilia’s Georgia

In the second half of the nineteenth century, with the leadership of the 1860’s generation, Georgian society was introduced to a cultural and educational movement of grandiose proportions, which impacted not only the literature produced immediately after but also works written in centuries to follow. Those emerging onto the scene during the

1860s believed that these years would awaken Georgia’s sense of nationalism:

At the earliest stages of spring, when the still-withered flowers begin to show color, it seems as though a mischievous smile appears with a promise of something good.

13 Tsira Kilanava, 48. 14 Ibid., 49. 15 Ibid. 16 Geronti Kikodze, “Ioane Batonishvili” in Chosen Works: Literary Letters and Portraits v.1 [in Georgian] (Tbilisi).

29 And then, all at once, it explodes out, shaking nature awake. These were the times we lived in.17

Ilia Chavchavadze and his contemporaries formulated a nation-wide program, a major aim of which was to create a literate and therefore politically engaged society. The

1860’s generation solidified realism into Georgian literature and declared war against the complacency of . While discarding this conservative aspect of their elders’ identities, the new generation merrily inherited their better aspects, such as the melding of politics and aesthetics in literature. This national-revolutionary movement also paid close attention to the monarcho-bureaucratic regime of the Russian Empire. Although the worldviews of Ilia’s fellow writers were deeply rooted in Georgian reality, the first political experiences of the movement took place in St. Petersburg where the writers received their education. Terek is a River that flows between Russia and the Caucasus and it is exactly due to their Russian educational ties that the older generations condescendingly termed them

Terek-drinkers, a name that has since taken on a positive connotation.18

1860’s in St. Petersburg present an epicenter of revolutionary ideologies. At the forefront of the human rights and revolutionary movement was Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

Chernyshevsky agitated for the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy, the creation of a socialist society and held close connections with Georgian students. On top of the ideological training, an important event in the formation of Georgian nationalist revolutionaries was the Student Strike of 1861.19 The protestors included Georgian, Polish

17 Akaki Cereteli, Full Collection of Works [in Georgian] XIV (Tbilisi: 1961), 6. 18 History of Georgian Literature: Second Half of XIX Century v. 4 [in Georgian] edited by G. Asatiani, (Tbilisi: USSR Academy of Science). 19 Ibid.

30 and Russian students, many of whom were imprisoned together, strengthening their thirst for action. The political significance of St. Petersburg is noted by Lenin:

The awakening of democratic movements throughout Europe, euphoria in Poland, discontent in Finland, the demand for political reform across the Russian Empire, […] powerful sermons of Chernyshevsky, […] revolts of the working class, strikes from students… In these conditions, even the most careful politician must have admitted that a revolutionary explosion was utterly possible, and peasant violence presented a real threat to security.20

Upon returning to Georgia, Terek-drinkers, necessitated by the colonized state of their country, took on the task of transforming art and literature into a tool of nation- building and liberation. Their work served as the most organic way of marrying everyday reality, history, and common soul of a colonized nation. This fusing of the individual and historical is evident in many texts of Ilia’s generation. Indeed, in post-medieval Georgian literature there is no other artist whose personal life was as representative of Russo-Georgian conflict as that of Akaki Cereteli, affectionately termed the third Terek-drinker. Estranged from a Russian wife and Russified children, Akaki being haunted is exemplified in his work, where he identifies the relationship between Russia and Georgia in terms of a broken family: step-mothers, step-fathers, step-children, abusive lovers.21 “She sings to you in the voice of a mother / But with the lyre of a step-mother. / Be aware! Do not trust.”22 In his poem about an abusive Fiancée, the protagonist directly addresses her captor, “Let me be, Northerner, /

What do I have to share with you? [...] / I am your prisoner, but my heart has hope, / That this cage / Will one day be shattered by my fate!”23 To those who have been Russified, Akaki writes, “The womanhood of old mothers / You have forgotten it, say, why? / [...], you've

20 Vladimir Lenin, Works, V (1949), 34-35. 21 Tsira Kilanava, 48. 22 Ibid., 81. 23 Akaki Cereteli, Full Collection of Works v.2 [in Georgian] (Tbilisi: saqartvelos ssr saxelmcifo gamomcemloba, 1950), 153-154.

31 colored like a Scythian! / How could you wonder that I despise you... / That I am not your lover / And that to your life / I prefer the graves of old mothers?!”24

Along similar lines, fellow poet Vazha Pshavela turns personal and national dignity into the central topic for his literature. Although largely considered to have produced the most aesthetically pleasing poems of his generation, Vazha’s nationalist tendencies are not to be discarded. Along with examining his most beautiful works, it is important to note the poetry he dedicated to other Georgian writers. “You watched over us, vigilant, / You were our safety,”25 he writes to Ilia Chavchavadze and by doing so, brings the nineteenth-century writers into Georgian pantheon of national treasures.

Whether Georgian society enjoyed it or not, work produced by the Terek-drinkers - born out of the pains of slavery and demanded by a tiny nation’s struggle for survival - became a true portrait of those living within Georgia’s shaky borders. Ilia’s contemporaries created an entire epoch, the “silver age” of Georgian culture which remains a resource for today’s Georgian literature. On an ideological level, their work prioritized national and societal themes while following a principle of cohesiveness between literary form and content. They paid special attention to language, equated the role of a writer to that of a national leader, and created national figures. In their prose and personal writings, Ilia’s generation was filled with national optimism. Akaki writes:

History has proven to us, that this little Georgia can withstand every pain and struggle! And truly, should this nation, which has birthed Rustaveli, Mtatsmindeli, Gorgasliani, David the Builder, King Tamar, George Saakadze, and those alike, be allowed to die? A century has not passed yet which has denied us a reason to live.26

24 Akaki Cereteli, 244. 25 Tsira Kilanava, 138. 26 Akaki Cereteli, 522.

32 Still, the movement was deterred from the success of liberation by several factors.

First, in many ways, Georgia's awareness of her enslavement at the time was not mature enough for active revolutionary nationalism. And second, many of Ilia's contemporaries were ultimately more inclined to see their movement as that of writers than of politicians.

The Georgian Poet

Fortunately, when Georgians speak about Ilia, he emerges as an exception to the rule of the poet over a politician. Ilia was born on the 27th of October, 1837 in the village of

Kvareli. “My mother” - he recalls - “would sit us down and read us stories, after which she explained the meanings and the plot. The next day, towards the evenings, she would ask:

‘Now, who can retell me yesterday’s tales the best?’ Whoever did it well would get my mother’s compliments and we cherished those greatly.”27 In 1848, his father sent him to

Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, where Ilia continued his education until moving to St. Petersburg in

1857. There he worked tirelessly and produced poems, stories, and several translations. It was the political unrest of 1861 that forced Ilia to leave the university prematurely and return home.

Though young, he arrived with a settled conception of his nation. His battle-plan and nationalist faith were written into Ilia’s major work “Letters from the Traveler,” in which he writes: “Before, whether it was in sickness or health, we belonged to ourselves, and that was better than nothing.”28 For Ilia, the basis for historical progress was human action and search, struggle for a better ideal, which was always to be found buried deep within

27 Ilia Chavchavadze, Full Collection of Works, [in Georgian] IX, (Tbilisi: 1957), 301. 28 History of Georgian Literature: Second Half of XIX Century [in Georgian.]

33 reality. From his earliest years, Ilia argued that the only way for Georgia to have a future and be free from tyranny was a nationalist revolution. For him, overthrowing of the colonizer and achieving national independence could only be obtained through battle, revolt, and the awakening of a nationalist mindset.

The first battle Ilia led was on the pages of a journal called “Daybreak,” in which the poet published a letter placing himself in contrast opposition to the of his elders – one that did not call for action from the citizenry. It was in this letter that Ilia pushed Georgians towards secularization and eventual emancipation. Here he wrote of the three divine treasures inherited by his countrymen: land, language, and religion. Prior to him, the list had been as such: religion, language, and King. Ilia’s writing showed not only a great desire to secularize Georgia by placing faith in nation above faith in religion,29 but it also gifted the place of the monarch to the entire land. The letter received outrage from the

Home Rule camp and brought democratic-revolutionary ideology into the center of attention. Highlighting the importance of this new order, on the 100th anniversary of King

Erekle II’s death, Ilia wrote a letter transforming the figure of a Georgian King into an embodiment of the motherland. At another time, while discussing Muslim Georgians, he stated, “Neither language nor clans nor religion can unite a people except the unity of history.”30

Another of Ilia’s major undertakings was his newspaper – “Georgian Herald,” which he turned into a tribune for nationalist activism. Despite strenuous censorship, the journal managed to print revolutionary-democratic ideology, at times masking it and at times bravely

29 Ironically, Ilia was canonized in the 1980 by the . 30 Ilia Chavchavadze, Works [in Georgian] IV, 267.

34 putting it on display.31 highlights how “The is greatly indebted to Ilia Chavchavadze, who - in 1861 - transformed it into something intelligible for the average Georgian. He was the first to prove that literature should reflect the common language.”32

He did not simply battle for the simple man’s language, Ilia also fought for peasant’s rights, changed the Georgian banking system, founded another influential weekly bulletin

“Iveria,” was a chosen delegate for the entire nation to the Empire, and was killed on the

30th of August, 1907. Georgian history cannot confirm what happened that day but Georgian people say his last words were “This is Ilia, do not shoot.”

Ilia was not just a poet, he was the father of Georgia as Georgians know her today.

Ilia’s longer works - “Is that a Man?!,” “Peasant’s Story,” “Letters of a Traveller” – and his poems remain as undying titans of Georgian literature. It was in these texts that Ilia undertook the task of fully displaying vileness and captivity of Georgian society. Though in every description he spoke of future and of hope.

Ireland Before Davis

Once the Williamite wars came to an end in 1691 with the Treaty of Limerick, the protestant ascendancy in Ireland seized all power over Irish civic and economic rights.

Greedily looking at the remaining Catholic assets, Dublin’s protestant parliament put in place the infamous Penal Codes and turned Irishmen into – in Yeats’s words – “slaves that

31 In its fourth publication, the “Herald” included Ilia’s “The Poet”, openly discussing his role as an artist and public figure. There was also a section termed “History of Georgia” which spoke extensively about the glories of the past Georgian army. Meanwhile, its last publication gave a voice to the Georgian peasantry, displaying several literary works (poems and stories) that centered around the theme of Georgians in poverty. 32 Niko Nikoladze, Works [in Georgian] V (Tbilisi: 1966), 58.

35 were spat on.”33 It was during the Penal Codes that a new breed of Gaelic poets emerged.

Thomas Ó Míocháin and some of his contemporaries turned away from the conventional vision poems and started to comment directly on the political events of their day. Between

1776 and 1781, Ó Míocháin published three poems that supported the American War of

Independence. He wrote of satisfaction at hearing the suffering of British troops overseas:

“It is a source of joy and satisfaction to me that Howe and the Saxons are vanquished and overthrown forever, and the sturdy Washington, supportive and brave, is leading and in control of his dominion.”34

Ó Míocháin also expressed his admiration for the Volunteers that would rise up with the Grattan Parliament:

Is it not a cruel case in the lands of Thomond, the earl, freshly appointed, that has come forth, from the fragrant vine of proud Cas, and of the virtuous [race of Brian] Bóramha, basely to have turned from the enduring banner and from the pure, illustrious rank received, to be a leader without fame, respect or expectation of a wretched bunch of swordsmen.35

He hoped not for independence but for the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, which would return prosperity to Irish Catholics. His poems only circulated in manuscript form and were known mainly among Gaelic speakers who sung them to popular tunes in alehouses.

After 1776, true to form and the old adage – “England’s extremity is Ireland’s opportunity,” Henry Grattan saw the English army spreading itself thin over the Atlantic and decided to organize his own – the Volunteers. They met at Dungannon in 1782

33 Malcolm Brown, Emmet J. Larkin and Dianne Larkin, The Politics of Irish Literature : From Thomas Davis to W.B. Yeats, ed. Washington Pbk (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 19. 34 Brian Ó. Dálaigh, “Tomás Ó Míocháin and the Munster Courts of Gaelic Poetry C.1730 – 1804,” in Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr (2012), 153. 35 Ibid., 155.

36 and in American fashion, pronounced the Dublin Parliament or Grattan’s Parliament as independent from Westminster.

The Parliament, despite its facade of Irishness, was largely unrepresentative of the country and found itself unable to contain the Agrarian crisis that plagued its peasants. Some of the militant members of the then-disbanded Volunteers grew angry at the corruption manifesting within the Parliament and decided that revolution would be less difficult than reform. Among them was Wolfe Tone, who rose to power through the Catholic convention and believed that the Irish peasants were a natural revolutionary force. In his critique of the parliament, Wolfe maintained that:

The power remained in the hands of our enemies, again to be exerted for our ruin with this difference: that formerly we had our distresses, our injuries and our insults gratis at the hands of England but now we pay very dearly to receive the same, with aggravation, through the hands of Irishman. Yet this we boast of and call a revolution!36

Joining with the Republicans of Belfast and Dublin, Wolfe organized the United Irishmen whose purpose was to push the country into an armed conflict against Britain for breaching the principles of the rights of man. In 1798, after coordinated insurrections across several

Irish cities, rebels were defeated and Tone was captured at sea.37

Following the brutal annihilation of the United Irishmen, Grattan and his parliament passed Pitt’s Act of Union with Great Britain and ceased to exist. After this blow to their nation’s autonomy, the Irish tried for one more bloody act of resistance. Robert Emmett, encouraged by the Napoleonic invasion of England in 1803, attempted to mobilize an insurrection. A lack of organizational skills produced an angry mob in Dublin that pushed

36 Malcolm Brown, Emmet J. Larkin and Dianne Larkin, 20. 37 Ibid., 21.

37 Emmett aside and took aimlessly to the streets. During his trial, Emmett paid close attention to his last statement, turning the courtroom into a stage:

Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man, who knows my motives, dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace! Let my memory be left in oblivion, and my tomb remain uninscribed until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.38

First, he was hanged and then his head was severed from his body in front of a large, petrified Dublin crowd.

It was in the years following Emmett and the Union that a nationalist school of verse began to spread its roots. The first signs of Irish poetic mystique, which Davis would later use to great extent, can be identified in the songs of Tom Moore. Moore’s “Irish Melodies” embraced defeat and transformed it into a “habit-forming enticement that exudes out of

“The Harp That Once through Tara’s Hills” and “Let Erin Remember”.” Moore’s characteristic tone can be heard in “After the Battle”:

The last said hour of freedom's dream And valor's task mov’d slowly by, While mute they watch’d till morning's beam Should rise and give them light to die.39

Easily seen here and later pointed out by Davis, the issue with Moore’s poetry – much like with the poems of Georgian Romantics – was that he “too much loves to weep.”40

As the Union became a reality and the moral imperfections of the protestant leadership were brought to light, the Irish decided to invest their political power into

38 Malcolm Brown, Emmet J. Larkin and Dianne Larkin, 22. 39 Giulio Giorello, “‘A Nation Once Again’: Thomas Osborne Davis and the Construction of the Irish ‘popular’ Tradition,” History of European Ideas 20, no. 1 (1995): 215. 40 Malcolm Brown, 59.

38 supporting Daniel O’Connell. A young Catholic lawyer, O'Connell conducted politics differently from what his people had seen before and wielded a great deal of influence through populism. When “The Liberator” – as he was nicknamed – took his seat in the

House of Commons as the head of an Irish delegation, he found that he had enough followers to balance between the Whig and Tory parties. So, he turned to peasant agitation and announced the founding of the Loyal Irish Association for the Repeal of the Union.41

It is important to note that O’Connell was a constitutional nationalist, hated revolution, and believed that independence was not worthy of shedding blood. His political aim was to awaken the Irish peasantry just enough and not a drop more. To do this,

O’Connell had to walk the line between holding his followers in check and encouraging others to join up. Announcing his search for the ’s members, O’Connell opened the curtain for the Young Irelanders in 1842 to come onto the stage of Irish history.

It was this group of ambitions intellectual leaders from the middle class that became tasked with bringing a soul to Ireland.42

Davis’s Ireland

Decades later, W.B. Yeats would be charged by O’Leary – his mentor and a member of the Fenians – to read certain Irish books that were to initiate his career. O’Leary’s picks prominently featured the writings of Young Irelanders which were published in their newspaper – “The Nation”. In the office of the most important nationalist publication of this time gathered a number of young men, including John Edward Pigot, John O’Hagan,

41 Malcolm Brown, 23. 42 Ibid., 44.

39 Thomas MacNevin, Michael Joseph Barry, Denny Lane, and Denis Florence MacCarthy.

English journalists would nickname them as , drawing reference to Young

England and other youth-movements. Despite efforts by “The Nation” to overthrow it, the title stuck.43

The aim of “The Nation” was to create and to foster political discussion within the

Irish public. It garnered an immediate success and directed the new-found influence towards forming nationalist opinion.44 The newspaper would go on to discuss issues such as Irish antiquities and Irish savages, envisioning “the possibility of the Episcopalian, Catholic, and

Presbyterian clergy joining in an Antiquarian Society to preserve our ecclesiastical remains— our churches, our abbeys, our crosses, and our fathers’ tombs.”45 Those publishing in the newspaper came to believe that mutual toleration between religions of Ireland was a major instrument for building up a nation and leading an armed resistance against the British rule.

Next to O’Connell, it was the greatest influence of its generation, one that gave back to the disenfranchised their voice and national enthusiasm. During the first years of its existence,

“The Nation” brought with it more reality into Irish politics than had been seen since 1782 and became the authoritative voice of the country.46

The Irish Poet

At the helm of the publication stood Thomas Davis. Davis was born at Mallow on the 24th of October, 1814. He was the youngest son of Surgeon-General Davis and of his

43 T. Moody, “Thomas Davis and the Irish Nation,” Hermathena, 0, no. 103 (1966): 13. 44 Ibid., 12. 45 Giulio Giorello, 215. 46 Thomas Davis and Griffith, Arthur, Thomas Davis : The Thinker & Teacher : The Essence of His Writings in Prose and Poetry (Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1922), ix.

40 wife, Sarah Atkins of Mallow. His family, in which he was the youngest, held political opinions of the few and Davis had to break through their influence in order to find Irish nationalism. He entered Trinity College in 1831 and was associated with it for almost ten years. Although he was an active critic of its educational system, Davis recalled his university with affection: “Many pleasant hours have I spent within the walls of the merry monastery. I have not, personally, one sad or angry reminiscence of old Trinity.”47

It was here that Davis took on the role of president of the College Historical Society.

During his final year of university, on 26th of June 1840, Davis made an outgoing address declaring his faith in Irish nationality and turning the speech into a landmark of his career.

Describing Ireland, He spoke:

To her, every energy should be consecrated. Were she prosperous, she would have many to serve her, though their hearts were cold in her cause. But it is because the people lieth down in misery and riseth to suffer, it is, therefore, you should be more deeply devoted.48

Leaving Trinity, he made a trip to the continent where he took to reading post-

French historians. Through these texts, Davis came to the conclusion that victories were possible if rationality was melded with force. Looking back on Davis almost a century later,

Patrick Pearse described his new breed of patriotism: nationality as a spirituality.49

Davis was the first in modern Ireland to publically declare that the Nation was to be rebuilt upon the Gael. To him, it was essential to undo the conquest.50 For this purpose,

Davis sent out an inquiry for professional advice on how to nationalize art. A leading Irish painter sent back a warning: “you have lurking hopes that things can be forced.” Davis had

47 T. Moody, 6. 48 Ibid., 8. 49 Malcolm Brown, 47. 50 Thomas Davis and Griffith, Arthur, Thomas Davis : The Thinker & Teacher : The Essence of His Writings in Prose and Poetry, xii.

41 to count painting out, poetry though was another matter. When called on by O’Connell and

“The Nation”, Davis realized his gift for verse and produced numerous poems along with his essays and dramatic writings. His language, like Ilia’s, was vernacular and meant for all to read. This newfound cultural nationalism provided the inclusive non-specificity for all

Irishmen to become enamored with the nationalist sentiment. All of Ireland could now fight for the “old cause that never dies.”51

Like the Georgians but unlike his own countrymen, Davis trusted that the Irish language was the deepest of the country’s roots. Though he knew very little of it, Davis understood its significance in decolonizing the Irish mindset and saw it as one of the richest elements of inheritance. He criticized the exclusion of Gaelic from primary school and discouraged the marking of the language with vulgarity. Even O’Connell, who was an Irish speaker, never used it in public. It was Davis, who insisted that Irish ought to be “cherished, taught and esteemed.”52 Davis was also the one whose anti-imperialism became most pronounced in the group of Young Irelanders. Whether stemming from his role as a pedagogue – like Ilia – or from an innate sense of understanding, Davis never made peace with the Empire’s existence. To him, empire was a “word of reproach to its achievers, of terror to its subjects, of abhorrence to the profound and good.”53

Though he rebuilt it, Davis did not invent Irish nationalism per se. He found it in

Irish folk music and ballads. As Duffy observed, all Irishmen had for music “an appetite almost as imperious as hunger.”54 Applying similar qualities to his own work, Davis’s verses

51 Malcolm Brown, 54. 52 T. Moody, 22. 53 Niamh Lynch, "Defining Irish Nationalist Anti-imperialism: Thomas Davis and ," Eire-Ireland 42, no. 1-2 (2007): 93. 54 Malcolm Brown, 62.

42 took on the role of unifying Irish nationalism. Winston Churchill, at the beginning of WWII, started one of his cables with Davis's own greeting: “A Nation Once Again.”55 Still, Most of

Davis’s writing was done in a hurry. He wrote too easily and with many defects. All of his verse had a missionary purpose and a journalistic quality. Davis did not write to express his own artistic soul, but instead to inspire the souls of Irishmen. Much like with the poetry of

Ilia, there is nothing easier than to be witty at the expense of Davis’s verse.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to Ireland, one that overshadows any misjudgments in his poetry, was that of an educator in nationality. He built and promulgated the idea of nation – a people joined together by a mutual devotion to a common history, values, and country. Unlike those before him, Davis looked to the past for not only lessons on what to avoid, but also as a source of national inheritance.56

His success lies not in the quality of his work but in its influence and permanence.

Davis has been read by generations of Irish people and has inspired every serious effort for

Irish independence. John O’Leary wrote of Davis:

Sometime in 1846, while recovering from a fever, I came across the poems and essays of Thomas Davis. . . . Perhaps it may give some notion of the effect it produced on me to say that I then went through a process analogous to what certain classes of Christians call' conversion '. . . . Everything was changed. ... I felt in quite a new sense that I was an Irishman, and that for weal or woe my fate must be linked with that of my country.57

In the summer of 1845, Davis was producing work more fruitfully than ever before.

It was also at this time that he became engaged to Annie Hutton, with whom he had fallen in love with some time before. The marriage never took place. Davis was only thirty when he

55 Malcolm Brown, 56. 56 T. Moody, 21. 57 Ibid., 24.

43 died in September of the same year. Duffy, his fellow Young Irelander was summoned to the house of Davis’s mother to behold “the most tragic sight my eyes have ever looked upon

- the dead body of Thomas Davis.”58 Davis passed from scarlet fever and there was nothing unusual about his death. Though the majority of his life was largely undistinguished, his funeral was a demonstration of public grief unparalleled in Dublin.

In the five years spanning his public life, Davis forged the repeal movement into a legitimate force. He encouraged unity and fought off misconceptions that had kept the

Irishmen apart. He restored a sense of dignity after the Union and has inspired every generation that has fought for national liberty since his death.59 When O’Connell retreated from the Repeal movement, it was Davis who pushed the idea forward. But the movement that stood at the threshold of triumph in 1843 died with Davis.60 What remained were his songs, regarded then and today by Irishmen as magic. And whenever the country was in retreat, his countrymen would listen for Davis, “who with only a verse or two and a couple of old airs could turn the tide of their disasters.”61

58 Malcolm Brown, 84. 59 Thomas Davis and Griffith, Arthur, Thomas Davis : The Thinker & Teacher : The Essence of His Writings in Prose and Poetry, xii. 60 Ibid., xi. 61 Malcolm Brown, 72.

44 Comparative Analysis and Interpretation

The following chapter combines discussions on the similarities and differences between chosen poems of Ilia and Davis. It serves as an overview of linguistic, nationalist and anti-colonial aspects of their work and draws connections between Davis and Ilia’s use of language, history, the concept of land, and descriptors of self and the other. Majority of the Georgian poetry has been personally translated while a small portion of it has been taken from Marjorie Wardrop, an English scholar of Georgian literature.

Differences

Before diving into the commonalities of Ilia and Davis’s poems, I would like to offer a discussion on the most important distinction between the two poets’ works - language.

Unfortunately, Anglicization of Ireland’s language was much more successful than the

Russification of the Georgian1; and so, many of those that preceded and the majority of those that followed Davis not only wrote in English but also had no knowledge of the Irish language. An interesting example of Ireland’s relationship with her language is Daniel

O’Connell, who was an Irish speaker but refused to use it in public and saw it as unimportant to the progress of Ireland’s rights.

Davis himself, along with his contemporaries, writes in English since at the time of his publications most of the country was more familiar with literature of this language.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, Kartvelian languages remained widely spoken. Georgian nationalist

1 This is due to first, the fact that business and rule in Ireland was conducted in English following the 1600s; and second, the which hit the Irish-speaking West the hardest. The famine led to masses of Irish citizens emigrating to English-speaking countries such as England and The United States. The Irish population felt a need to be prepared for a circumstance that could force them to leave the country; and so, they turned to English.

45 literature emphasizes the importance of a distinction between the Russian and Georgian languages and all of Ilia’s poems are written in Georgian. He, much like Karl Deutsch, understood that language was a fundamental characteristic of most nationalist groups and allowed for the creation and transmission of collective memories.2

In an active battle against the mixing of Russian and Georgian languages, Ilia appeared before the Censorship Committee in 1893. He protested being tasked with the publishing of a Russian poem in “Iveria”, arguing that a Georgian publication should not be printing poetry in another language, but the censorship Committee forced him to include the verse.3 Even more than fighting against inclusion of non-translated Russian texts, Ilia’s work makes comedic remarks on the expanse of those Georgians who had taken Russian words into their vocabulary.

In “What Did We Do, What Were We up to” Ilia - writing about a conversation between a grandfather and his grandson - uses Russian words for satire.4 The first –

“naplecho” – is written with Russian letters but gets mixed with a Georgian noun-ending.

When asked about what his generation did once the Georgian banks failed, the grandfather tells of Georgians asking the government to teach them “naplechoba”, or how to be lazy.

Here, a word taken from Russian and forced into the Georgian lexicon ties directly with complacency of the populace. The other term, “pojalusta” – meaning ‘please’ in Russian – is written out in Georgian letters, signifying the mixing of two languages by the older generations. The word also comes at the very end, as the grandfather begs the boy to stop

2 Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication : An Inquiry into the Foundation of Nationality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966), 130-132. 3 Maia Ninidze and George Rukhadze, 369. 4 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1 (Tbilisi: metsniereba, 1987), 125-126.

46 asking about Georgian history since the poem has dissolved into an account of his people’s shameful docility. The Russian word encased in Georgian letters stands as a sign of surrender.

On the other side of the European continent, his contemporaries’ disinterest in the

Irish language did not stop Davis from using “The Nation” as an outlet to give Ireland a cultural definition which necessitated the rehabilitation of her language. As he was not the first to ponder the idea of cultural nationalism, Davis took note from the United Irishmen who were interested in reviving the Irish language as a means of cultivating the Irish nationality.

In addition to the United Irishmen, Davis was also inspired by his European travels and readings of German philosophers – mentioned in the literature review – who argued for the importance of language in maintaining a nation.5 In 1840, during his speech as the president of the Trinity College’s Historical Society, Davis argued that the Irish language - which was still being spoken by a considerable amount of the population at the time - was worth studying and should not be seen as secondary to English.6

Even more, In the months before his death, Davis published a series of articles entitled “Our National Language” where he voiced his hopes that the Irish language could turn into an essential characteristic of national identity, one that could unify his countrymen.

Years beforehand, he had also published an article called “The Irish Language” in which he writes about Reverend Conveys's accomplishments in proving the “importance of Irish to

5 Decades before Davis’s birth, J.G. Herder – a German philosopher – had introduced his theory on the national language as one of the essential characteristics of every nation. 6 Jean-Christophe Penet, “Thomas Davis, “The Nation” and the Irish Language,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 96, no. 384 (2007): 436.

47 the general student of Irish and history.”7 For Davis, if the Irish were to speak their national language again, then Ireland would – “if dull to the foreign tongue, and untractable to the foreign sway - grow bright and eloquent (...)”8

For both poets, using the oppressor's language instilled a sense of inferiority in the colonized. English had “calumniated [Ireland's] intellect, [its] language, [its] music and [its] literature by punishing as treason Irish traditional conversation.”9 It was due to this that the

Irish had started to converse in English and by doing so, were unconsciously aiding the enhancement of prejudices against their own nation.10 This very idea was explored by

Seamus Deane in “Celtic Revivals”, where he points out how the use of English within the nation hinders progress, highlighting the political value of English and how it can colonize independent voices and restrict sovereignty.11

Signing many of his verses as “The Celt”, Davis held similar beliefs and trusted that the Irish could not only fight against English imperialism but also get in touch with their past through the Irish language. “Nothing can make us believe that it is natural to speak the speech of the alien, the invader (...)”12 Regardless, he was rational and understood that speaking English was important to the Irish trade and economy. He was also disadvantaged by his own lack of knowledge of the Irish language. Therefore, the role of Irish in the country's national identity was rather limited. Still, Davis actively encouraged his audience to recover their language, recover a part of their identity so that they may build an Ireland “of

7 Jean-Christophe Penet, 436. 8 Ibid., 237. 9 Thomas Davis, The Nation, January 1843. 10 Ibid. 11 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals : Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1980 (London: Faber, 1987), 118. 12 Thomas Davis, The Nation, December 1843.

48 old - the land of the saint, and the kind of the brave.”13

These distinctions in their environments and abilities drove Davis to use language in ways differing from those of Ilia. Since the majority of his verses are attached to Gaelic airs,

Davis’s work implies an Irish rather than an English tradition from the start. For him,

English functions as the medium of writing and it is only in sprinkled phrases and words that he brings Irish into his work. In instances where he uses the Irish language, Davis attempts to create gaps between the British and his own people. In the “Lament for the Milesians,”14 he repeats “A’s truagh gan oidhir ‘n-a bh-farradh!”15, mourning their lost lineage.

In “Clare’s Dragoons” he writes, “Our Colonel comes from Brian’s race, / His wounds are in his breast and face, / the bearna baeghail16 is still his place.”17 Taking from the writings of J. G. Herder, Davis understood that a lack of language difference between groups necessitate that other aspects be emphasized in order to create distance between the colonizer and colonized. So, by speaking of “Brian’s race,” Davis connected an Irish phrase with history and a heroic figure (the colonel). “Victor’s Burial”18 is filled with Gaelic terminology. Onchu, craiseach, fleasgs, and tuireamh19 grant the victor a proper, Irish ceremony and in “Rally for Ireland,” “True Irish King,” and “The Geraldines” England is referred to as Sassenach, the Irish name for an English person. His use of Irish phrases and terminology serves as a push for the Irish readers to produce and remember the sounds discouraged by occupation.

13 Thomas Davis, The Nation, June 1848. 14 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, The Poems of Thomas Davis, 95-96. 15 “It is a pity there is no heir to their company." 16 “the gap of danger” 17 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 158. 18 Ibid., 104-105. 19 flag, harp, helmet, collar, a masculine lament (in order)

49 Similarities

Works published by Davis and Ilia center around four major themes: land, female figures, history and myth, and signifiers of self and the other. Ilia - rightfully termed as

‘father of the Georgian nation’ - was the first and most prominent example of a public figure attempting to shape his people’s identity through models similar to those used in Western

Europe. In 1860, he offers the populace a trinity, one that would become a formula for

Georgian identity: “fatherland, language, religion.” There is no concrete proof that Ilia put much emphasis on this formulation. He wrote only a couple of sentences about it in his critique of a poem that had been badly translated from Russian to Georgian and he never returned to the notion explicitly. Regardless, the trinity became a required slogan for

Georgians in the 1980s, once a mass nationalist movement got going.20

Each element of the threesome is a building block for Georgian nationalism. It is important to note that the term “fatherland” is a deliberate choice for Ilia, one that he relates to the French ‘patrie’. Gia Nodia argues that this was Ilia’s attempt to rationalize or transform the nation into something more active.21 Unlike in Ireland, ‘land’ as a word in itself was rarely used to signify Georgia. In most literature and everyday speech, the historical territory was referred to as motherland, a place of birth to be more exact in translation but a word that evoked the feminine nevertheless.

Ilia’s plan to masculinize the land is at once perplexing and understandable since he often used the female figure to signify Georgia but also yearned to turn nationalism into active, revolutionary, masculine force. Indeed, in the majority of Ilia’s poems, ‘fatherland’ is

20 Gia Nodia, “Components of the Georgian National Idea: General Overview,” in Birth of the Georgian Nation [in Georgian] (Tbilisi: Ilia Chavchavadze State University, 2009), 122. 21 Ibid., 123.

50 used as a separate entity from the Georgian mother or the female figure. The poet feminized the nation, but when he spoke of land as a collection of Georgians, he viewed it through a masculine lens. This produced the idea that Georgia’s sons were those that inherited the fatherland but that they also came from one Georgian mother. Described as “great” in “The

Ghost”22, the fatherland is an active participant; one that seeks blood, sacrifice, revolution, and liberation. In several of his poems Ilia brings love, God and fatherland all together: “Oh fatherland! The godly power of loving you, who can stand in its way?”23

In contrast, Davis uses ‘land’ and Ireland interchangeably. In “Rally for Ireland”,

Davis even echoes Ilia’s desire to masculinize the concept – “They’ll give us the lands of our fathers again!”24 Here, Davis is attempting to instill a sense of inheritance, an idea that

Ireland has belonged to the Irish for centuries. He writes, “We are heirs of their rivers, their sea, and their land.”25 Though Unlike Ilia, Davis places more emphasis on the territorial aspect of land. It is both an embodiment of Ireland, an idea, and a physical object for him.

In “Men of Tipperary” and the “Vow of Tipperary”, the Irish acquire indigenous qualities:

“Lead him to fight for native land, / His is no courage cold and wary,”26 “But never more we’ll lift a hand - / We swear by God and Virgin Mary! - / Except in war for native land.”27

In “Song of the Volunteers,” a portion of the land is referred to as the North, giving it a territorial character:

The North began, and the North held on The strife for native land, Till Ireland rose, and cowed her foes –

22 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1 (Tbilisi: metsniereba, 1987), 195. 23 Ilia Chavchavadze, “Georgian Mother,” in Poems [in Georgian] v. 1 (Tbilisi: metsniereba, 1987), 206. 24 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 140-143. 25 Ibid., 95-97. 26 Ibid., 31-32. 27 Ibid., 198-199.

51 God bless the Northern land!28

In “The West’s Asleep,” Davis writes that the land is demanded by “Freedom and nationhood,”29 echoing the active character of Ilia’s nation.30

Moving along, the fact that religion stands only third in Ilia’s triad displays the ambivalent relationship between his new brand of nationalism and the church. On one hand,

Orthodox Christianity has been a major player in the formation of the Georgian identity. It has often been attributed with saving ‘Georgianness’ during the Middle Ages. One of the earliest descriptions of Georgia as a unified entity comes from the tenth-century religious leader, George Merchule. He defined Georgia as the territory within which religious sermons were read in Georgian.31 Therefore, in several ways, the identification of Georgian language with nationality is also indebted to religion.

Despite this, Ilia’s hesitation to tie the Georgian identity with a specific religion has several legitimate causes. First, this strategy goes against the nineteenth-century trend of liberal nationalism, which Ilia was attempting to replicate from the West. Furthermore,

Orthodox Christianity - the most widespread religion in Georgia - was unable to draw a distinction between the colonizer and the colonized. The Russian Empire had, at this time, stripped Georgia of her own religious autonomy and united her places of worship under the

28 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 171-172. 29 Ibid., 37-38. 30 Land and its ownership is as much a materialistic necessity for Davis as it is a means by which the national freedom can be achieved: "The land of a nation is the property of the nation, or property and nation are but terms in a tyrannous riddle, without justifiable or intelligible meaning. Where the soil comes, by usage or long usurpation, to be considered the property of the rich or noble, the people must of necessity be enslaved; and enslaved they must remain, while such tenures continue to subsist." (Thomas Davis, “India: Her Own and Another's” The Citizen, v. 1 (1839-1840): 262.) 31 Gia Nodia, 125.

52 Russian church.32 This meant that not only was there no distinction between the basic religious beliefs of the Empire and Georgians but there was also no opposition between their churches as institutions. Reminiscent of the ideas proposed in Adrian Hasting’s theoretical work, Orthodox Christianity could, simultaneously contribute powerfully to nation-construction and perpetuate a strong universalist and anti-nationalist dimension.33 The Georgian sentiment of Russia being a religious sibling remains strong today and was rampant during Ilia’s public service. Since one of Ilia’s major goals was to create a disconnect between the colonizer and Georgia, he had to not only turn more attention to the fatherland but also significantly de-emphasize religion.

So it was tactical to place fatherland before religion and language. Georgia, although she is small in territory, boasts not only several dialects but distinct Kartvelian languages.

Though these may all have the same alphabet, they are different enough to cause friction if language had been placed as the primary aspect of the Georgian identity. This specific order of the trinity also places itself in comparison to the official doctrine of Nicholas I of Russia and his new minister of education, S. Uvarov. At the time of Ilia’s birth, and later during his education in St. Petersburg, the slogan for the Russian Empire was “Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality.”34 No wonder then, that Ilia - who had to be keenly aware of this positioning

- actively worked to revert the order in his search for a Georgian nationality and further distinguished his nation from the Russian identity by including language. It was through this

32 Gia Nodia, 125. 33 Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood : Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge University Press, 1997, 21. 34 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “Nationality in the State Ideology during the Reign of Nicholas I.” The Russian Review 19, no. 1 (1960): 38.

53 triad that Ilia allowed fatherland to come first, justifying the existence of varying languages and religions within one nation.

When he does speak about religion, Ilia is intentional in discarding any specific religion and uses the general notion of a God. In “The Poet” he writes, “I speak with God /

So I may lead the nation.”35 Here, Ilia conducts a strategy of tying together his own nationalist project with God. This can be seen in several places of “The Ghost”36: “It’s been forgotten that from the sky, / The sole godly gift we have is the Fatherland,” "Powerful

God! For you, have Georgia’s sons been fighting, / Since birth they have known nothing of peace.” This last quote blurs the lines between a deity and the nation. For Ilia, as the

Georgian son fights for his land, he is also fighting for God.

At times, Ilia uses God to justify his actions. Ilia’s critique of Georgian complacency was gathering much discontent from fellow citizens, leading to lines such as these: “If men do not see, at least God will know / That our motives, desires are holy.”37 In other instances, he risks being labeled a heretic, subverting religious stories and beliefs. In “The Georgian

Mother” he goes as far as to retell the Bible, and speaking directly to freedom, he writes,

“The tree of knowledge, planted in Eden, was your tree; / And even Eden, full of everything, whole, / Without you was not enough for the first human soul.”38 Both in these examples and throughout his work, Ilia manages to separate Georgia from any one religion while making the nation and her freedom into communal objects of worship.

35 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1 (Tbilisi: metsniereba, 1987), 103. 36 Ibid., 195. 37 Ilia Chavchavadze, “My Quill,” in Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 120. 38 Ibid., 199.

54 A similar strategy was used by Davis, who struggled against the divisive nature of religion in Ireland. Unlike Ilia, Davis inherited an Ireland that was battling between two faiths within her own borders. Therefore, an emphasis on any specific religion in Davis’s nationalism would have led to farther antagonizing of the Catholic or the Protestant Irish. In

“The Boatman of Kinsale” Davis writes from the perspective of Ireland, making the nation into a living person. In the concluding line, the speaker herself equates land to religion, stating, “He’ll trust in God, and cling to me.”39

It should also be pointed out that since “The Nation” began as a recruiting mechanism for O’Connell’s Repeal movement, there was a need to avoid alienating

Protestants who felt little connection with the Catholic politician, while maintaining the support of his base. So when he mentions religion, Davis makes sure to take on a generalized approach: “For our country and King, / And religion so dear, / Rally men, rally!”40 In the “Green Above the Red” Davis reflects Ilia’s attempts to equate the land with religion: “We’ll trust ourselves for God is good, and blesses those who lean / On their brave hearts, and not upon an earthly king or queen.”41 Davis’s nationalism - one centered around

Irish culture - provides the inclusive space for the gathering of all Irish objectives into one broad nationalist sentiment. For the purpose of furthering this inclusive space, and in order to create and circulate a narrative which links the modern nation to a “golden age,”42 Davis turns his attention to literature and history, uniting the Irish beyond religious divides.

39 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, The Poems of Thomas Davis, 83-84. 40 Ibid., 140-143. 41 Ibid., 195-198. 42 A phenomenon Anthony Smith viewed as the major aim of poets and artists in a national movement.

55 Similarly, at the center of national identity in Georgia, Ilia places a common past, allowing for a diversity of language and religion. In doing so, Ilia made sure that several faiths and dialects could exist under a shared culture. Of course, to give the history some cohesiveness Ilia used distinct parts of Georgian identity, but he placed significance not on any specific category but on the shared centuries of struggle towards freedom for the territory, religion or language.43

Unlike those that wrote before them, Ilia and Davis looked back not for mourning but for inspiration. This nationalist strategy is widely discussed in theoretical works by

Anderson, Smith, Hroch, and Chatterjee. Anderson proposes the idea that nations use maps, museums, flags, and anthems, along with print capitalism in order to imagine themselves.44

Indeed, these poets saw their past as both a way to avoid making mistakes in the future but also as a large reservoir of artifacts they could use to shape the nationalist sentiment. Ilia and

Davis did this by reviving and reformulating myths, providing heroic figures, and documenting the trauma of colonization. In his search for historic figures, Ilia finds King

Pharnavaz, the first King of Iberia, and King Demetre the Devoted.45 In “What Did We

Do”, he satirically retells Georgia’s 19th century in a question-answer dialogue between grandfather and grandson; and in “Aragvi,”46he paints one of the prominent Georgian rivers in the role of a historian.

Following along similar lines, Davis does not create the past but he repackages it in a way that had not been attempted before. Anthony Smith sees this repackaging as a major

43 Sergo Ratiani, “Georgian by Religion: Secularization and the Birth of a Georgian Nation,” in Birth of the Georgian Nation [in Georgian] (Tbilisi: Ilia Chavchavadze State University, 2009), 44. 44 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 45 Tsira Kilanava, 64. 46 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 192.

56 aspect of the cultural revival, allowing for the rediscovery of national epics, folk songs, and so on.47 In an attempt to rediscover these myths, Davis writes of battles in “Clare’s

Dragoons”:

O Comrades! Think how Ireland pines, Her exiled lots, her rifled shrines, Her dearest hope, the ordered lines And bursting charge of Clare’s Dragoons48

In “Fontenoy” he recalls victories to almost mythic proportions: “With bloody plumes the

Irish stand - the field is fought and won!”49; and in “Geraldines” he uses history as a source for present inspiration: “The forms of centuries rise up, and in the Irish line / Command their sons to take the post that fits the Geraldine.”50

Other works by Davis stand as examples of Partha Chatterjee’s arguement, that “if the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being.”51 So in several of his poems, Davis attempts to bring singular heroic figures, old and new, into the common imagination: “Wail, wail him through the Island! Weep, weep for our pride! /

Would that on the battle-field our gallant chief had died!”52 In “Tone’s Grave”, he turns a nationalist hero into myth:

In Bodenstown churchyard there is a green grave, And freely around it let winter wings rave: Far better they suit him - the ruin and gloom – Till Ireland, a nation, can build him a tomb.53

47 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 27-28. 48 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 158-160. 49 Ibid., 164-168. 50 Ibid., 109-113. 51 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, (Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 52 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 137-139. 53 Ibid., 177-178.

57 In “Men of Tipperary”54 and “Song of the Volunteers of 1782,”55 he writes of revolutionary groups of the past, imprinting a sense of continuity and rebellious tradition into the Irish mindset; and in the “True Irish King,”56 he hypothesizes of a coming hero. Giving Ilia and

Davis’s tactics a theoretical explanation, Tom Nairn proposes that in many instances of cultural nationalism, the purpose is “the mythical resuscitation of the past, to serve present and future ends. There, people learned the auld songs in order to add new verses.”57 By reworking the past, Ilia and Davis gave their people images of mythical and historical figures that they could idolize and try to emulate in the future.

It could have been this desire to form a commonality, a brotherhood, a sense of family; or perhaps it was the association of femininity with colonized nations throughout literature that inspired both Georgian and Irish poets to often view their countries as female figures. In Davis’s work, the nation is an object requiring love, a female to be given affection to by the Irishmen. “My Land”58 and “Clare’s Dragoons”59 see Ireland referred to with female pronouns, further describing her as “fair” and beautiful. “Boatman of Kinsale” and

“The Welcome” both use the land as their speaker:

The eagle shelters not his nest From hurricane and hail More bravely than he guards my breast – The Boatman of Kinsale.60

The speaker in both of these poems converses with an Irishman, one that she can both take care of and be taken care of by. “I’ll pull you sweet flowers, to wear, if you choose

54 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 31-33. 55 Ibid., 171-172. 56 Ibid., 105-108. 57 Tom Nairn, "Scotland and Europe" New Left Review, 0, no. 83 (1974): 57. 58 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 91. 59 Ibid., 158-160. 60 Ibid., 83-83.

58 them; / Or, after you’ve kissed them, they’ll lie on my bosom."61 Though the gender of the speaker is never explicitly stated, using “my breast” and “my bosom” point towards a more feminine readingll of the land.

For Ilia, the figure of a mother becomes more prominent. “Georgian Mother /

Scenes from the Future,” “To the Mother of Georgia,” and “Lullaby” all present the idea of a woman who births and raises her sons in order to send them off to war as a sacrifice for the nation’s liberation. “We must birth our own destiny / We must give the people a future,”62 “Your heart trembling will hold / Child, this mother’s lullaby / Will turn to a sword.”63 Here, the mother takes an active role in both creating a future for the Georgian nation and instilling a sense of martyrdom into her sons.

Meanwhile in “The Poet,” “My Dear Country,” and “Spring” Georgia is addressed as

“my love” and “my dear”, giving her the role of a beloved, someone to court and to defend.64 By feminizing the nation, these poets give their populace a way to think of themselves as coming from one mother, a woman they were supposed to love and who loves them all. Those that inherited the land remained masculine, capable of violence, while the motherland could at once be in need of saving and in the position to sacrifice her children.

The remaining common elements of these nationalist poets’ work take on the task of describing a colonial reality. Overcoming or documenting the trauma of colonization and looking towards the future becomes a repeating theme. Other topics emerge as self-sacrifice,

61 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 74-75. 62 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1 (Tbilisi: metsniereba, 1987), 67. 63 Ibid., 84. 64 Tsira Kilanava, 77.

59 death, and rebellion. Alongside these, the reader finds a practice of marking the self and the other. These markers are descriptions, features or even embodiments of the colonizer and the colonized. Davis and Ilia, though they published at different times and a whole continent apart, produced work that has several of the same literary faces designated to their countries and oppressors. Georgia and Ireland are often described as captives, slaves, orphans and asleep or ignorant to their colonization. Meanwhile, England and Russia are presented as captors, enslavers, and strangers.

Artistic descriptions for the colonized see Ilia use slavery in “My Tariarali”: “Slavery does not become a man / As Christ has proved before."65 In “Happy Nation” he satirizes the present state of subservience: “Content as us / Is there any other Nation? [...] / Bent but grateful; / Bearing all, [...] / With her head low.”66 By describing the nation in such a way,

Ilia can criticize the submissive attitudes of his people while maintaining a call to revolution.

For him, slavery is at once an involuntary state imposed on by the big, bad neighbor, and a voluntary existence that can be overthrown through active resistance.

While lamenting Owen Roe O’Neil, Davis chimes in with similar critique: “Had he lived, had he lived, our dear country had been free; / But he’s dead, but he’s dead, and ’tis slaves we’ll ever be.”67 Of course, Davis contradicts himself often. His work would have little nationalist meaning if he truly believed that the Irish only had a future as slaves. Though in order to properly highlight the loss of a free spirit, he must exaggerate the slave stereotype.

In the same poem, Davis writes, “But we’re slaves and we’re orphans, Owen! - Why did you

65 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 72. 66 Ibid., 29. 67 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 137-139.

60 die?” This orphan metaphor is also explicit in Ilia’s “The Hermit.”68 Even more, a running thread throughout Ilia’s poems is lack of a father, exemplified in the generational gap of

“What Did We Do.”69 The father figure is missing, largely replaced by the entire fatherland.

The burden of saving their nation must rest on the revolutionary youth.

As mentioned, Davis becomes more optimistic in other poems: “Let the brawling slave deride, / Here’s for our own again.”70 For him and for Ilia, slaves are often citizens with an un-awakened nationalist consciousness. They remain in a state of ignorance, one that is coupled in many of the poets’ works with sleep. Ilia writes, “The slumber of my land caress. / O God! O God! when will we wake / And rise again to happiness?”71 while Davis has an entire poem titled “The West’s Asleep”: "Alas! and well may Erin weep / That

Connacht lies in slumber deep.”72

Though if the colonized is asleep, orphaned and enslaved, the colonizer's major marker is that of a stranger or a foreigner: “Sleek from the Sassenach manger- / Creaghts the hills are encamping on, / Empty the bawns of the stranger!” writes Davis in “O’Brien of

Ara.”73 In “Nationality”, he highlights the innate sense of autonomy within the Irish: “A nation’s right, a nation’s right- / […] / ‘Tis freedom from a foreign yoke.”74 In “Penal

Days”, he tells the history of the English subjugation: "A stranger held the land and tower /

Of many a noble fugitive.”75 By continuously referring to the colonizer as a stranger, foreigner, or in the Irish language, Davis creates a clear divide between his own people and

68 Ilia Chavchavadze, Ilia Chavchavadze Works (Tbilisi: Ganatleba Publishers, 1987), 7-10. 69 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 125-126. 70 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 50-53. 71 Ilia Chavchavadze, “Elegy” in Ilia Chavchavadze Works, 42. 72 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 37-38. 73 Ibid., 114-116. 74 Ibid., 178-181. 75 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 147-149.

61 the English. He reminds the Irish reader that there should be no comfort in the rule of an other. Attempting to highlight the same idea, on his way off to St. Petersburg, Ilia writes “To

The Mountains of ”: “From a strange land I will still send my heart to you.”76

Going along, documenting the past and looking towards the future take hold in

Davis’s “Our Own Again” and “Vow of Tipperary”: “Too long we fought for Britain’s cause,... / She paid us back with tyrant laws,”77 “Man is master of his fate; / We’ll enjoy our own again.”78 In a single stanza of “Green Above the Red,” he tells Irish historical trauma and also promises the coming of something better:

And they who saw, in after times, the Red above the Green, Were withered as the grass that dies beneath a forest screen; Yet often by this healthy hope their sinking hearts were fed, That, in some day to come, the Green should flutter o’er the Red.79

Since Ilia and Davis belong to the second phase of nationalist discourse – outlined by Hroch as the emergence of nationalists who work to win over the masses in order to start the project of nation-building80 – both poets must offer their populace a reason for joining the anti-colonial movement. So they write of a possible, achievable, independent future.

For Ilia, similar lines can be found in “What Did We Do”, where he takes on the task of retelling Georgia’s history of colonization:

For example, during those days that Georgia’s fate began to falter When Erekle passed away, Who was what our country hoped for.81

76 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 25. 77 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 198. 78 Ibid., 50-53. 79 Ibid., 195-198. 80 Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National : A Reader, 63. 81 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 125-126.

62 Here, he documents the oppression with cynicism and harshness in order to remove romantic notions surrounding colonization. No longer is the state of subjugation something to be lamented, it becomes a problem to be fixed. In “My Dear Country”, he encourages the nation directly: “My dear country, what’s made you sad! / Though today is unkind, future’s still to be had.”82

Though perhaps, self-sacrifice and rebellion are more important than any of the other themes for a colonized nation. These are the driving forces for the ultimate goal of liberation. In order to perpetuate the notion of self-sacrifice, Davis and Ilia describe death for their country as preferential to colonial life. Davis writes:

Far better by thee lying, Their bayonets defying, Than live an exile sighing Annie, Dear.83

In this and other poems, death is something to be admired and to be striving for. Davis goes as far as to write of his own grave and hopes that the discussion around his death will be akin to this: “‘He served his country, and loved his kind.’ / Oh! ‘there merry unto the grave to go, / If one were sure to be buried so.”84

On the other side of Europe, Ilia encourages his fellow countrymen to take up arms and offer themselves up to the nation. Though he seems to consider his own voice weaker than that of the “Georgian mother.” And so, Ilia speaks through the voice of a woman, who is raising her sons so they may eventually give their lives to the national cause. “Immortal is

82 Tsira Kilanava, 78. 83 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 69-71. 84 Ibid., 219-220.

63 the child / Who has died for the fatherland,” writes Ilia in the “Lullaby.”85 In the “Georgian

Mother”, he describes the tension between the love of the nation and individual life.

Unsurprisingly, love for the nation wins consistently:

In your death is my lament And my celebration, Since I have mothered both you And the Georgian nation.86

Ultimately, the development of the nation, markers, the present themes and this need for self-sacrifice culminates in a call for rebellion. Both Davis and Ilia discard the ideas of a

Home Rule or a peaceful solution. Ilia writes, “Only a gun / Can find freedom,”87 perpetuating the belief that overthrowing an oppressive regime requires force. In the same poem, he includes a “Song of the Armies:”

Georgian, grab your sword, [...] The day for rescuing our land has come, Our country beseeches us to save her, And go to find freedom - Better, than all else to be found.88

Not only does Ilia call for revolution, he sees it as a godly, justified and pure cause: “True is the sword/ That the love of fatherland has touched.”89

In her work on African anti-colonial imagination, Irele Abiola argues that literary effort can become identified with an ideological project, which often turns out to be coextensive with aggressive militancy.90 Davis and Ilia stand as examples of Abiola’s hypothesis. In “Clare’s Dragoons” Davis calls onto his countrymen, “Then fling your Green

85 Ilia Chavchavadze, Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 84. 86 Ibid., 199. 87 Ilia Chavchavadze, “Georgian Mother” in Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 199. 88 Ibid. 89 Ilia Chavchavadze, “The Ghost” in Poems [in Georgian] v. 1, 195. 90 Abiola Irele, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2001), 53.

64 Flag to the sky, / Be Limerick your battle-cry, / And charge till blood coats fetlock high.”91

In “Song of the Volunteers” – not unlike Ilia – he discourages the thoughts of a peaceful resolution: “How vain were words, till flashed the swords / Of the Irish Volunteers.”92

By bringing forth the lines from Ilia and Davis’s works, this analysis hopes to show how anti-colonial nationalism births similarities within literature across continents. Though

Ilia may have written his lines in a certain rhyme scheme and Davis in another, the call to action is one and the same. These poets wrote so that their people would sing. “And, freely as we lift our hands, we vow our blood to shed, / Once and for evermore to raise the Green above the Red!”93

91 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, “My Grave” in The Poems of Thomas Davis, 158-160. 92 Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Thomas Wallis, 171-172. 93 Ibid., 195-198.

65 Conclusion

Though it attempts to cover a wide range of commonalities between Georgian and Irish literature, this thesis, like any other piece of research, has several limitations. The poems brought up in this text are only a portion of the work written by Ilia and Davis. Similarities highlighted in my analysis are not exhaustive, and neither are the differences. Having translated most of the poetry myself, Ilia’s verses run the risk of losing their artistic nature, rhythm, and even rhyme in some of the cases. This lack of a more thorough translation has been the most difficult concession to make, but perhaps others will take on the specific task of translating and complete it better than I have done here.

What this thesis does provide is an introduction to the work of two of the major

Georgian and Irish poets. It serves as a gateway to learning about both these countries’ histories and their colonial realities. More than this, it offers an overview of how Georgian and has followed a common formula in order to create a national identity. The importance of land, myths, heroic characters, motherly figures, and calls to self-sacrifice are present in poems of both nations, uniting them in the struggle against colonial oppression.

Bringing these themes together, I hope to have exemplified how verse can serve as a powerful medium for cultivating a revolutionary spirit – something both Ilia and Davis were acutely aware of. At a time when the Irish are still struggling for unity and Georgians are losing their land daily to Russian occupation, nationalism – cultivated around inclusivity and love – appears just as important as it was during the nineteenth century.

It is especially vital to produce work on Ilia’s nationalism today, to cultivate the same sentiment within the Georgian people, and to awaken a dormant need for true autonomy over the fatherland. Further translations of Georgian poetry and general literature should be

66 conducted not only in order to maintain the national spirit within large groups of migrants but to also familiarize the international community with ‘Georgianness.’ Sakartvelo1 has wisdom to offer and there should be available resources for those seeking it.

More than all else, my reason for writing this thesis is to bring the case of Georgian nationalism and literature to the table, and to show how the empirical material of Ilia’s poetry can exemplify the theoretical works surrounding nationalism. By doing so, perhaps readers of other nationalities can draw similarities between their own literature and that of

Georgia’s. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of this work is to allow those of other languages, religions, and histories to find something familiar in both Ilia’s and Davis’s writings. May we read more poetry, write more poetry, and know more about ourselves as we learn of each other.

1 Georgia’s name for herself.

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